How to stop comment spam on your blog

Comments inside a blog is really awesome features for both blogger as well as for readers. In case of blogs comments are really good source of information and an efficient way of engaging a site's users in discussions. Through it bloggers are notified if they did any mistake in their post and readers are benefited to make the things from clear. Good comments also appear in search engine ranking and thus also increase your blog traffic.

But there are situations where spammers spam this nice feature by comment spamming. Spammers leave comments on blog posts that have nothing to do with the post itself but merely contain multiple links back to the spammer's commercial website. In most cases there may be computer generated programs that do automatic comment spamming rather than by individuals. Whoever do the comment spamming main goal of it is to create links back to spammers' website so that it helps to get their ranking in search engine and also bring traffics to their site. Following image is an example of spam comment.

Due to so many comment spamming many bloggers tend to disable comments to their blogs. You can easily disable comment by clicking "Post Options" and then selecting "Don't allow". Another way you can disable all users comment unless the members of the entire blog by,

- Sign in to blogger Dashboard.
- Click on Settings.
- Clik on Comments submenu.
There you will have Who Can Comment? section and then you can choose from,
-- Anyone - includes Anonymous Users
-- Registered Users - includes OpenID
-- Users with Google Accounts
-- Only members of this blog

But that is not a solution if you do blogging. You should take initiative to make the best use of this nice blog commenting feature so that you can avoid those unrelated, gibberish comments. You have to stop spam comments and continue posting good useful comments for your blog.

I have presented some tricks by which we can avoid spam comments for your blog.

1)Enable Comment Moderation and set email when someone comments: The most useful tricks to avoid spam comment is enable comment moderation. Don't publish a comment until you approve it manually. To enable comment moderation,

- Sign in to blogger Dashboard.
- Click on Settings.
- Clik on Comments submenu.
- Under Comment moderation section you have the following options as radio button.
-- Always
-- Only on posts older than .. days
-- Never
You should choose Always radio button. So until you approve comments they will not be published. Whenever someone comments a link will appear on your dashboard when there are comments to review.

If you put your Email address after the Email address textboox then as soon as someone comments inside your blog, blogger will email you at that address when a non-member leaves a comment on your blog. If you keep it you will not receive any emails rather comments link will appear on your dashboard only. Following image is the setting for my blog.

2) Use CAPTCHA to prevent automated comment spamming: CAPTCHA is a distorted series of letters and numbers or images which appear on the page and that you have to type in. This is designed to prove that you are a human and not an automated program program or bot. If Captcha is typed correctly, it will allow you to submit your comment, otherwise it will stop automated comment spamming.

As a blogger owner you can implement captcha from Settings to Comment menu and then under "Show word verification for comments?" section.
Selection radio button Yes will show captcha.
And then it will help to reduce comment spam.
Note that blog authors will not see word verification for comments.
Following image is the setting for my blog,

3)Disallow anonymous posting?: Many ones prefer to disallow anonymous posting. That is you cannot post comments if you are not
- Registered Users - includes OpenID
- Google accont holders or
- Members of this blog
But I don't prefer this option. My opinion is anonymous should be allowed to post comments still.

4)Specialist Software Intervention: There are some specialist softwares which read the comments and decide whether the comments are spam. One such software is Akismet. Although it was developed for Wordpress, but it has been modified to work with many other types of blog software and so it's worth checking out.

Related Documents
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/06/different-types-of-web-hosting-services.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-add-site-to-yahoo-directory.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-add-site-to-google-directory.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-know-when-googlebot-last-crawled.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-add-different-meta-tags-to.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-disable-or-remove-blogger.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/scrolling-text-effect-html-code-with.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-post-larger-images-in-blogger.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-transfer-or-sell-blogger.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-add-email-subscription-form-to.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-add-favicon-to-blogger-blogspot.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-add-tag-cloud-category-to.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-add-auto-read-more-feature-with.html