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.
