Corante's Comment Spam Problem

I often read the weblogs offered by Corante, because they mostly choose excellent, thoughtful writers representing a broad range of expertise. They're rather nicely designed blogs too, with decent usability and readabilty. Obviously some people over at Corante know a few things about doing blogs well.

Why, then, is comment spam such a pervasive problem on Corante blogs? That's like making a nice dinner and then just dumping it directly on the table in front of your guests, without a plate -- an unnecessary and disturbing mess.

Here's what I mean...

On May 11, Dorian Benkoil posted a pretty good item to Corante's Rebuilding Media group weblog: From "We" to "Oui".

I just read that article a few minutes ago (on May 13). I was saddened to see that sometime yesterday (May 12) some sleazeball appended three obvious spam comments to the end of this article.

Here's what I saw (click to enlarge):

Ugh... that's so disappointing, especially on a high-profile, nice-looking site like a Corante blog.

It seems to me that if your blog is getting any noticeable attention -- and especially if you're banking on a reputation as a blog-savvy individual or company, spam comments should NOT make it to your blog. Or, if they do, they should be noticed and removed promptly.

Over at my other blog, Contentious, I moderate comments mainly because of the huge volume of comment spam that blog attracts daily. The moderation function is built into WordPress, and I use it. It works. And the conversation that occurs via that blog doesn't seem to suffer because of it.

For this blog (The Right Conversation) I use Typepad. So far I haven't had much of a comment spam problem, so I've left comments open. Occasionally someone will try to slip a spam comment through, but because I get immediate e-mail notification of all new comments to this blog I usually find out very fast that I've been spammed, and delete it promptly. (If comment spam gets to be a major problem here, I'll start moderating comments.)

So if I can do that, why can't Corante prevent or at least immediately remove comment spam? They're a popular site, and thus a very likely comment spam target. Why am I seeing today spam comments left there yesterday? I hope they'll eventually get around to removing the comment spam -- and if so, I preserved a visual record so this posting will still make sense after the fact.

I like Corante, I really do. However, I think this problem undermines their credibility as producer of leading weblogs.

Furthermore, when I see spam comments, I get immediately turned off from the idea of commenting on or linking to that posting. So I think comment spam has a chilling effect on the public conversation.

I hope Corante addresses this issue soon.

Comments

[Ann Handley]

I like Corante, too, Amy, and agree the comment spam has (as you say) a "chilling effect on the public conversation."

Here's one way: I reluctantly changed the setting on my blog comments to "moderated" because of all those and low-lifes...

As a result, I think it removes a certain freshness and temporarily stops what is clearly a strength of blogs -- free-form give and talk between writers/readers; in essence, it forces me to "ok" comments...which I am loathe to do. It puts a roadblock between writers and the audience, which...well, sucks.

[Clair Ching]

Spam in comments is difficult to deal with. Actually it depends on your blogging software. For example, in WordPress, Akismet has been working well but there would be 9 out of 200 spam that would pass through. I really do not know why those other 9 get through but they do. In other blogging software, like Coreblog which I use on another blog, the spam eraser and spam captcha methods are the only common ways of dealing with spam. There are not enough preventive measures. It sometimes takes a little bit of technical know-how to solve these things.

In any case, it is terrible that Corante has been suffering a flood of spam. But turning on moderation of comments could undermine the conversational nature of blogs, in my opinion. These are the times I wish people would just stop spamming. Self-governance is something I have been thinking about for the past how many weeks. If we have that as individuals, I think we wouldn't have to bear too many troubles :)

[Hylton Jolliffe]

Hi Amy and thanks for the friendly prodding about the issues we're having with spam. It's a bear of a problem and we're doing what we can to root it out. We've had a breakthrough in the past few days actually (we pray) and are hoping we've turned a corner.

[Amy Gahran]

Thanks for stopping by, Hylton (and Ann, and Clair). Yes, comment spam is a thorny technical problem. Personally, I find that moderating comments doesn't seem to impinge the freshness of discussion on Contentious.com much because I'm online so much and can generally approve comments very quickly. But for other bloggers, yeah, that could be an issue.

Hylton, please let me know when you think you've got this licked, I'd like to let my readers know.

Thanks,

- Amy Gahran

[Steve Sergeant]

When my podcast first went live, I installed a comment module on Blosxom that didn't have any moderation capability. About two weeks after it was up, I woke up one morning to find almost 100 pharmaceutical spams in comments accross various posts -- the only comments I'd received so far. So I uninstalled the comment module, deleting the comments in the process.

Another Wordpress blog I maintain now e-mails me 400 spam comments a day for moderation, but it only gets about 2 or 3 legitimate comments a month. I'm about to turn off e-mail notification on that one and just check for new comments manually every week or so. Nobody has time to wade through 400 spams a day that you can't filter effectively.

For my podcast, I now encourage listeners to provide their feedback by way of a toll-free phone answering service. I only get legitimate comments that way (but fewer than one per month), and no spam so far. I can turn those around and re-post them in a day or so if I'm around. Sometimes I'm traveling away from civilizaton for 3-8 days at a time, so sometimes posting those comments has to wait.

[Romerican]

Corante needs to learn *more* about doing blogs well. Not only do they have the comment spam problems you mentioned, but they don't seem to offer RSS feeds (which is a joke). Let's hope their good writers locate some technically competent partners.

[iiq374]

Thankfully so far I've found that just simple human verification is enough to kill the spam on my blog.
Seems like unless you are really high profile spammers can't be bothered with the effort to do it manually.

[iiq374]

I guess it is also worth pointing out that comment spam is much like a graffiti - the problem perpetuates itself.

If you get hit with it but clean it up quickly then (in both cases) they don't tend to be bothered with carrying on and others dont start.
But if the site (wall or blog) is left with graffiti / spam on it for a few days then everyone starts targetting it.

Its why those email notifications of comments work so well!