Our fearless founder Denise noticed some untoward comments on her blog. So I checked the comments on this blog and found about 500 spam comments, all in the last four months (since 26 Jan 2013, to be precise), and most on old posts, which I have deleted. Only one was porn, BTW.
What to do now?
Basically there are five choices, as I see it.
1. Do nothing. That's not a viable option as I would spend WAY too much time deleting spam.
2. Use word verification. I know some of you use it, and I do understand why you do. But as a personal preference, I HATE WV.
3. Approval of all comments. Seems to cut the free flow of the discussion, and makes more work for me. I do this on my own blogs, and that's effort enough.
4. Approval of comments after so many days, since most spam is on older posts. I have done this; it was 8 days, but I changed it to 15 when I:
5. Eliminated anonymous comments, which is virtually all the problem, by utilizing Open ID, which you can read about HERE. It should work with those of you who are using most blogging products. I hope this is not too onerous. If so, write to me at rogerogreen [at] gmail [dot] com.