Blog Tipz

Comments are a large part of everyday blogging – both in the sense that they take a large amount of time to manage and that comments provide instant communication and viewpoints from your readers on your posts.

Unless you happen to be running a wildly successful blog, the moderation isn’t completely overwhelming, but more of a nuisance task.  Anti-spam plugins and built-in software can enormously reduce the task of finding spam comments before they hit your blog posts, but what about the comments that manage to filter through and appear in your “Awaiting Approval” list, comments that the system is unsure of?  In the case of this blog, most comments are able to be published, but others are withheld for approval.

Whether you glance over your awaiting comments list or simply have it set to automatically delete them all, we’ll explore how to properly determine whether the comment is spam (and how spam filtering software programs determine this).

Judging by stats from anti-comment spam plugins, more than eighty-nine percent of commenters want to have little more to do with your blog than gain a sale or backlinks (or aggravate you).  With a percentage this high, it is important to put methods (and comment policies) in place from the very beginning.

When you glance over your list of comments, use this simple guide for determining whether the comment is spam or not:

• Text: If the comment makes sense, then it is more than likely legitimate, although there are mass comment scripts that will distribute the same message throughout millions of blogs.  
• IP Address: Spam harvesting plugins/software checks IP addresses against lists of spammers, and if the IP address matches that of one on the list, then the comment is marked as spam.  You can check the location of an IP address to see where it is coming from.
• E-mail and Website Address: Sometimes these may hide the fact that the comment came from an adult, pharmacy, or related website, using scrambled letters or text.  It isn’t recommended that you go to the website, but in many cases, a scrambled URL will indicate a spam site.  Plus, by now, you should have recognized that the comment was either mass produced or not relating to your topic.

Generally, if you find comments appearing in your awaiting approval area of your blog system, it is a good indication that they are spam, and not legitimate.  There has been debates whether spam protection services raise too many false positives, or instances where real comments do not pass through the spam definitions list to the post.  On this issue, it is up to you to decide what your policy is.

Note: In the image/screenshot, all three comments turned out to be spam.