Fighting Comment Spam -- Bring it on Spammers!

Just a quick update to this post, we have posted the code in this blog entry.

As most bloggers know, these days we are facing a new form of evil on the web: COMMENT SPAM. Comment spam is where unscrupulous individuals take advantage of programming API’s for blogs to post comments to personal blogs in mass. Because it’s programmatic it’s fairly easy to automate and because so many people use similar blogging systems comment spam has been flooding blogs at an alarming rate.

In the last year, I estimate we have had to remove some 10,000 comment spam messages from the OfficeZealot.com blogs. It’s a major time waster, its embarrassing as most comment spam is filthy and it’s really hard to stop.

About a month ago we went to a new blogging engine written in .NET called .TEXT. .TEXT is an impressive open source blogging engine. I like it because it performs very well, has many nice features and best of all you get the source code.

To fight comment spam we have added a simple challenge/response in the commenting process. When a reader wants to post a comment they have to type in a 3 digit number (that is randomly changed) to verify that a human and not a machine is indeed writing a comment.

At first I was worried that some would not post comments because of this extra step. I’m happy to report though in the last month of its use we have not had one complaint and not one comment spam. I think everyone realizes that cautionary steps are warranted if we want to protect the web.

So spammers…. Bring it on!