Changes to this blog

I have changed the way that I am dealing with comments on this blog, this only related to anonymous comments and doesn’t affect anyone commenting using their blogger account, nor does it stop anyone who wants to preserve their anonymity from doing so.    

I think the main problem relates to the amount of traffic that this and the Thanet Press Release bog now gets, around 2,000 visits a day to Thanetonline and around 700 to Thanet Press Releases.

There are several different types of problem comment, I will explain below.

1 Commercial spam comment, this runs at around 200 comments per day, some getting through the automatic spam filter and some not, however on all 200 occasions I receive a comment notification email. Obviously this means that I can’t read all of the emails so I have had to turn this facility off. Before the current spam storm that has been going on for several months, nearly all of the emails related to comment that had actually appeared on the blog. My phone made an unpleasant noise when a comment appeared on the blog and I took some action, either deleting, spamming or replying to the comment as appropriate.

2 Obscene and insane comment, this seems to have no purpose and be akin to people writing on lavatory walls, although recent experience seems to suggest that some of this is commercially related. What starts out appearing pointless often leads to the same mad comment appearing at a later date with a link leading to either an infected and malicious site.

3 Comment which has content that may be libellous, in many cases it mentions real local people and I have no way of telling if the libellous allegations are true or false, apart form possibly giving up my life to investigating them, so the only thing I can do is delete them as soon as I see them. My guess is that they are a mixture of allegations that have some foundations in truth. Comments left by people who are just too stupid to realise that there are limits to what you can say in public forum. Comments left by people who would like to see my blogs closed down, so approach this by leaving comment that is likely to either attract a libel action or a complaint to Google who host blogger and have rules which if broken result in a blog being removed. Comments left by people with mental health or behavioural issues.                 

I had considered turning comment moderation on but frankly I don’t have the time or the inclination to vet all the comments. I guess like most of the other blog readers, I look at the blogs occasionally during the day, reading the comments as threads and trying to make sense of them, sometimes adding something myself, if I have the inclination.  

The comment management I do completely differently from a page that shows all of the published comment for the blog, the options here are, delete leaving the “this comment has been deleted by the blog administrator” delete altogether so it and any replies vanish completely and spam so it and any replies vanish completely.

The regular commentators who either use their own names or a pseudonym, John Hoyler, Tom & Tim, bloggers like Simon, Tony and Peter, Chris Wells and so on never leave comments that need deleting and I didn’t want to interfere with their ability to leave comment.

So at the moment I am going down the road of altering the comment permissions when I don’t have the opportunity to keep an eye on the blog. I tried it out last night, turning off the facility to comment anonymously while leaving the facility for signed on commenters to comment and then turned it back on this morning.

Early days of an experimental solution, but already I have had a large reduction in commercial spam.      

Any thoughts from blog readers about this will be gratefully accepted and I will take them into account.