Like most blogs that have the comment feature enabled, we get hit by the automated comment spam scripts every day. The WordPress spam protection, Akismet, works very well… 6,976 spam comments have been intercepted since we launched this blog last fall.
But occasionally the spammers outsmart it and one gets through… or a legitimate comment gets flagged as spam. The latter happened twice last week. The former happened today and it was a raunchy one.
I deleted it early this morning but of course, everyone on the email notification list for that discussion thread got the nasty words in their email. Thanks to both Ross and Kiffi Summa for alerting me on it… and to Kiffi for her suggestion that I explain what happened in a blog post.
The only additional step we could take to prevent this from ever happening would be to moderate all comments, requiring that one of us manually approve each one before they get posted. Since we’ve had over 1,200 comments posted, that would be a lot of work for us. I know it first-hand, as I used to manually approve all comments submitted to the Northfield.org ISSUES list. I really don’t want to do that again.
My apologies to all of you who were subjected to that bit of ugliness today. I can’t promise it won’t happen again, but it should be rare.
It happens to everyone Griff. I recently had a comment slip through the filter on my blog that had some really bad links involving animals and people. Let’s just say there were quite a large number of keywords that, in retrospect, I’m glad I hadn’t thought of.
thx, Nick. I’m glad I don’t have to do that kind of manual filtering!
And this sort of thing is exactly why we *do* have to manually approve comments on the NorthfieldPlan.org website, but Dan Olson and I (who have the “keys”) try to do it on a timely basis, i.e. within a couple of hours whenever possible.
Having a blog of my own, I have to say, comment spam seems to make most junk e-mail look Leave it to Beaver-wholesome. But I’m glad Locally Grown has the open commenting — the delay of sending in a comment and having it approved hampers discussion. And the occassional spam comment is worth it.
I would post here, but your site thinks I am a comment spammer… 😎
Well, I will keep trying anyway.
-John
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