What “Conversation”? – How to Deal with Spam Comments

One of the things social media promised is the proverbial “conversation”– an authentic feedback mechanism where the publisher and reader become participants in a discussion. The way it goes is that the blogger/writer will post something and the readers who are compelled enough will respond with a comment and the blogger respond to it correspondingly.

But what if the reader who comments is a spammer?

I’m sure at some point, a blogger will receive seemingly authentic comments that actually are spam. This sophistication means that spammers are staying away from “Buy XXX drug” and moving to intelligent responses.

So how do you deal with it? Here’s a couple of suggestions:

1. User better comment moderation tools – There’s Disqus and Intense Debate to help you moderate the comments. The interfaces and features of the two tools are much better the default WordPress or Blogger moderation tools.
2. Turn off blog comments completely – While this is the ultimate “last resort,” this may be the feasible option for bloggers that don’t have the time to mark or moderate comments or when the volume of the spam comments have become unmanageable. In my experience, I turned commenting off for a few weeks, then turned it on again and the spam attacks subsided considerably.

Responding to relevant and authentic comments is one of the joys of blogging. But when the conversations become fake, it’s becomes the blogger’s worst nightmare.