We, like many others, have been inundated with comment spam in recent weeks. Dealing with this is a complete waste of our time so we've had to make some changes. We're never going to be able to prevent spammers from posting comments. Every method I've seen suggested removes functionality that is genuinely required for comment systems - we should encourage the publishing of links, not prevent them and anonymous posting is required in certain circumstances.

So, we have to let the spammers in and deal with the mess they make. And rather than relying on the bottleneck of James and I, we need to open up so that everyone can contribute to the quality of the content here. So, we've decided to use the wiki for commenting in future. Wiki's get spammed but the spam doesn't hang around long because anyone can delete it. Problem solved and we get the benefit of integration into other comments and postings, free linking, formatting, revisions, etc. etc. It's basic at the moment, but should be easy to extend to copy some of the posting content across to the wiki page to provide some context. We've left trackbacks alone because we're not getting any trackback spam yet…

Update October 2004: switched to WordPress and now using a security keyword approach to comments which seems to have eliminated all comment spam.

1 Comment

1. wedding blogs and wikis
   it's a vision of the future that, frankly, brings tears to my eyes. the original idea came as a solution…

   Trackback by <dykes.d().digital> — 11 Apr 2004 @ 9:32 pm

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