So lately, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time going through and dealing with Spam on so many blogs. The comments look real, they read like real comments. They are most likely done by hand rather than spam bots, but if you look at the URL they’ve used, and sometimes their name as well, you’ll see that they are still trying to spam.
This is frustrating because their comments add some small value to blogs, but on the flip side, they are just trying to get links to their site, drive traffic to their ads, or otherwise create a poor experience for people online.
How do you deal with this type of spam on your blog? Do you mark it as spam, delete it, edit it to not include the URL, or just approve it outright?
We can’t check the URL on every comment, as it can get time consuming, but by marking good quality comments as spam based on the URL field, are we messing up Akismet?
Let me know in the comments below, and please…no spam.
Sidenote: J Angelo Racoma recently wrote about this on Performancing (What do you do with valid comments that have commercial links?) and got a few opinions about what to do with the comments, so I’d love to see more discussion on what tools you use to moderate and manage these comments without getting too many false positives. Is Akismet still the best way to manage spam on WordPress blogs, should people be using multiple plugins, or is another service better?