I’ve been under a bit of a spam deluge recently here on my blog. I have to hand it to those spammers, their comments are getting more human-like everyday, with their text relating directly to the post in question.
Before today I’ve tried some options in BlogEngine.net to get rid of spam like enabling the AkismetFilter settings. Much to my disappointment it didn’t seem to have any effect on the amount of spam I was getting – it just kept piling up!
I drew to the conclusion that I was just going to have to put up with it, deleting comments manually. Then this weekend after I upgraded to the shiny new BlogEngine.NET 1.6 I was playing around with the comment admin panel and strolled into the Configuration tab.
At first glance nothing special in there but then the “Moderate Comments” checkbox caught my eye. I never normally moderate comments before they are posted but with today’s spam count reaching fever pitch I thought I would succumb to an anti-free speech approach to keeping my comments clean and relevant.
I clicked the checkbox and much to my surprise I found a whole host of functionality I would never have associated with “Moderation”. I had always associated moderation with something manual that I must do – I had never checked this box before. My friends, I must tell you that this was like discovering the buried treasure on Treasure Island – it was a pure moment of enlightenment. There, below were rules for capturing spam and filtering it out automatically.
Now, I don’t have any evidence that this was the flaw in my anti-spam campaign, but time will tell – i will be sure to keep you updated if it makes a difference.
What did I learn from this discovery? There’s a lesson in there for everyone about user experience and the subtleness of convention based approaches. The convention in this case would for BlogEngine.NET not to put the spam settings under “moderation” (hiding them by default doesn’t help either) but under “Comment Spam”.
Also, it pays to click everything and also read the instruction manual :-) Anyway, for those of you that come across this post and find it to provide the same kind of enlightenment that it did for me, happy (spam free) blogging!