I was shamelessly trying to come up with a list for the ProBlogger group writing project, and I couldn't think of anything at all. Usually I'm rather witty about these things (ahem), but I was rather stuck. Sadly, my ability to communicate with fish did me no good, either.

Inspiration was found, though, after going through the filters at the other places I write. For the zillionth time at a much bigger blog than this, the moderation queue was chock full a'spam. So, in the interest of me not telling the bosses what to do for the 745th time, I thought I'd throw up a quick and dirty tutorial on how not to get spam in your blog.

9. Close old comments. The chances that somebody's going to comment on that post you wrote about your summer afternoon in 2002 are pretty darn slim. Shut 'em off.

8. Make people register to comment. Sounds mean, but it makes it more difficult for the drive-by spammer. Movable Type/Typepad use Typekey authentication, so you only have to register one time, and Dupral lets you have one login for all Dupral sites.

7. Bad Behavior if you're using WordPress, and Akismet if you're using a lot of other kinds of blogging systems.*

6. If you're on Blogger, only accept comments from registered users, and set up the Comment Notification Address so you'll know when evil strikes old posts.

5. If you own your own domain, learn the virtues of .htaccess scripting. A few lines of code can drastically reduce your bandwidth.

4. Moderate comments so they don't appear until you approve them. This may not stop the spam from showing up, but it will keep the spam from being effective. WordPress has a great system for this, allowing you to approve comments from users you've already approved.

3. Turn off HTML in comments. Even when spam slips through, the effect is negated, as all you'll see are a bunch of gibberish lines of code the spammers hope would work.

2. Don't accept comments or trackbacks. At all. I've turned off comments here, since they rarely added to what was I writing. Plus, the "no spam" thing.

1. Be totally unpopular, nowhere near the Technorati Top 100 bloggers. That's really your best bet, and it's how I keep this place free of spam.

Sigh.

ADDED: And a bonus tip for you linkers in the house (who are awesome, by the way): never send trackbacks. I know, you want your mad blog hits and whatnot, but the spammers of the world are on the lookout for deer-trails, or known vulnerable sites where they can chunk ye olde spam without worry that it'll be deleted. While it's entirely possible that somebody my follow a conversation that's months or years old, the great likelihood is that it's just a bot following a list of compromised sites.

* I should add, TechZ reminded me of Dr Dave » Spam Karma 2. While it was as effective as a matador at keeping spam out for me, your results may vary.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-10-13T04:14:11.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
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  similarterms: spam comments blog comment sites time effective spammers wordpress great added writing dupral register approve lines accept code list trackbacks
comments:
  - id: '26'
    author: Michael Anuzis » Sharing Advice
    date: '2006-08-26T15:30:16.000Z'
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