Six Apart, maker of the popular blog softwares Movable Type, TypePad and most recently Live Journal (via an acquisition just announced) has taken a true blog “industry” leadership position in battling the vexing problem of comment spam. Their latest line of defense is this detailed document describing how spammers attack and how bloggers (using various blog publishing systems) can best respond. I haven’t read all the way through this yet, but it looks like such a useful resource, I thought I’d post it immediately.
Six Apart: Guide to Comment Spam
Hi Rick
Do you have a link to the document mentioned?
Best Regards
Hans Henrik
Comment by Hans Henrik — January 7, 2005 @ 1:56 pm
Guide to comment spam
It took me hours to delete all the comment spam that flooded this blog a few weeks back. The experience led me to switch from pMachine, the software I was using, to Expression Engine. Both are produced by the same company, but Expression Engine incl…
Trackback by a shel of my former self — January 7, 2005 @ 3:26 pm
Interesting, Rick. Very useful document, thanks for finding it. Glancing through it shows a lot of help if you have a Movable Type blog.
I have a TypePad blog – and as far as I can tell, there’s nothing you can do to prevent comment spam, other than turn off commenting. Lots you can do after the event, but I’d rather implement some prevention!
I posted about this very subject – how do you prevent comment spam in a TypePad blog – at about the same time as your post:
http://nevon.typepad.com/nevon/2005/01/there_must_be_a.html
I’m hoping someone might have some suggestions re a TypePad blog.
Comment by Neville Hobson — January 7, 2005 @ 3:41 pm
Hans, the link is in the item headline, which is my convention on this site for most links, for better or worse.
Neville, strange that you have such a problem with comment spam on TypePad. I have very little. I notice that comment spam that turns up seems to get deleted automatically by the system. Aside from that, I just don’t get that much to begin with on my TypePad blogs. On my MT blogs, I was pounded by it till I turned on TypeKey, but I’ve seen so little of it on my TypePad blogs I just assumed they had something built in that was working so well I didn’t even notice it. (Now that I say that, I just browsed through recent comments and found a few spams, but not in the volume I used to see on my other blogs. But maybe I’ve just been lucky.)
Comment by Rick Bruner — January 11, 2005 @ 9:19 am