I’ve just done something I was hoping to avoid on my blog. I disabled comments for any post older than 90 days.
This is a bit disheartening for me, but it’s just been a nightmare trying to keep up with the amount of spam landing in my spam queue on posts that have been indexed by the search engines.
I generally try to write ever-green content (content that serves purpose even long after it’s written) and for that reason wanted to keep comments enabled on those posts. The problem is when the search engines picked up those old posts that rank alright, spam started appearing for all sorts of things.
I’ve used three main strategies for fighting spam on this blog.
- Askismet Spam Plugin
- Disabling comments on old posts (must to my dismay)
- Using a third party comment management system: DISQUS.
Disqus is actually the one that stops the spam appearing on the blog. Their spam filter has so far been pretty much perfect for me.
Askismet categorises the spam and puts it into the spam queue for me to review. Here I can look through a queue of all the junk comments and pick out ones that are legit.
Disabling the comments as I mentioned above isn’t ideal for me because of my desire to write ever-green content. I’d like my guests to be able to comment even on old posts. But alas, I’ve had to make this sacrifice to free up the time I normally spend looking for legit comments that fell into my spam queue by mistake.
What strategies do you use for spam protecting your blog? Do you have a problem with spam? Have you had to goto any further extreme methods of getting rid of these annoying junk comments?
I use NoSpamNX. Works great!