Stopping the spam flood
Following a recent flood of comment spam last week, I’ve decided to tighten up on my blog commenting policy. I’m now limiting comments to two hyperlinks each, which must not be in BBCode format. WordPress doesn’t use BBCode anyway, and I’ve never seen a genuine comment on anybody’s blog which contains more than one hyperlink, so I don’t think this is going to be a problem.
I’m also going to close comments and trackbacks right across the board to any IP address which has three comments pending moderation in my spam queue or which gets trapped by Bad Behavior three times in a week. In practice, it’s not likely to affect you unless you are running a spam bot on your computer or network.
If you want to do something similar on your own blog, it’s handled by the the latest version (1.3) of Comment Timeout. Note that this is still in alpha, so use it at your own risk. It’s configurable as before, so you can set it to allow three — or more — hyperlinks if you prefer.
Posted at 22:50 on 4 February 2007.
Actually, two to three links in a comment is VERY common, as people often want to point to one or two sites and then put their site in for a signature, which is really not proper manners since the comment form and presentation does that for them. Why be redundant?
Still, I see a lot of two-three links in a good comment, so be careful. If your blog doesn’t encourage comments, or comments with links to recommendations or other information on a regular basis, then this is a good attitude to take. For others, it isn’t.
Just FYI.
Good point, but I do think there needs to be some kind of limit. I found that in a random sample of thirty spam comments, one had two hyperlinks, one had four, and all the rest had five or more. I’ve set it to four for the time being and I’ll see how it goes.