Sunday, July 18, 2010

Turning on comment moderation

I hated to do it but I finally turned on comment moderation.

It wasn't that I got any nasty or rude or insensitive comments. It was the unrelenting spam via an Internet Service Provider on Taiwan called Chunghwa Telecom.

There were times last year when I got 10 or 11 spam comments on multiple blog posts on the same day. And they had to be deleted one by one, a time-consuming task.

The spam stopped for awhile but recently it's started up again with a vengeance. I understand Blogger is a free service but I wish it would do a better filtering job. And I'd love to know if there's a way to block this one ISP.

When I leave a comment on someone's blog, I like the instant gratification of seeing it appear immediately. But it's getting to be ridiculous. Every day I'm deleting a half-dozen or more spam comments.

I can approve comments by e-mail and I check my e-mail pretty regularly, so there shouldn't be too much of a lag time. And the only ones I plan to reject are spam.

So far, it's working. I had five spam comments in five minutes earlier this evening and none of them got on my blog.

Thank-you for understanding.

4 comments:

Steve On Broadway (SOB) said...

I feel your pain. Each day I'm deleting three or four myself.

Esther said...

Two things I forgot to mention: Blogger lets you bam anonymous comments, which these are. So that might solve the problem. Also, I can have moderation apply only to older posts, which would cut down on it. I really don't enjoy this blanket moderation. But I don't enjoy deleting the spam either!

Steve On Broadway (SOB) said...

Most of those comments I've been deleting on my blog aren't anonymous. They have some bizarre name and it usually contains a link to a site for something completely unrelated to sell something. They're incidious.

Esther said...

Another idea I had - most of my spam seems to come between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. So I was thinking I could turn on moderation overnight then turn it off in the morning. Although that might be more of a pain in the neck.