I am not sure of the value of  blog registrations. I will have to research the intent if I find the time. My thought is that there is hope that comments will be automatically approved for registered visitors, but that is not the case with this blog or any of my blogs. I do manual approval of all comments on all of my blogs. I also have Akismet activated on my blogs. If there are a high number of comments flagged as spam I often just dump the spam folder.

I also limit commenting to the first 14 days that a post is active. This has reduced the spam load significantly.

Comment spam is a problem for any blog. If care is not taken there will be many meaningless comments and long link lists. People are always looking for the easy way out to build backlinks to their sites. Comment spam is the scourge of the blogosphere.

Some times I think that I should post these comments on the blog for the comedy value. I doubt that my real visitors would get the joke. Many of these auto comments are so far off topic that they have some comedy value. Like comments about the wonderful article and the great writing style on a post that only contains a picture.

Many people that use this auto commenting software do not learn how to use it or set it up. They also are not aware enough of keywords to target the comments properly. I occasionally run across a blog that does not hold comments for approval, but most blog owners that care leave at least the default process in place.

The default handling for comments, and the options, are under the discussion link in the settings panel of the admin area. The default is to hold a comment unless the commenter has a couple of comments that have been approved. Another default setting is to hold comments with more than two links in the post body. My comment policy states no links in the post body, and I enforce that most of the time. Of course, auto commenting software doesn’t read the comment policy anyway.

Going through the Web Pickups Blog comments is almost refreshing at times. I have allowed a few of these comments when they are well targeted. I did that more before I had much experience and realized that most of these comments are not written directly by a real person. The blogosphere would be a better place without auto commenting software just as the email inbox would be a better place without email spam.

I have also been paying a bit of attention to my server logs since implementing a new program on some of these blogs. There is some debate in my mind if that program is working, but I have not yet given it a fair trial. I think that the strategy will work in the long run if I keep with it, but I have some question about the short run stats. All of that is for another post, possibly on another blog.

What I have noticed by checking the server logs is that most of my comments do not come from site visitors. It became apparent that the bulk of the comments were posted directly to the comment page without the poster coming in through the front door. I first thought that there must be a list somewhere of the urls deep-linking to comment pages, and, more or less, that must be the case, but the list is contained in auto-spamming software packages or harvested by automated url harvesters.

Having seen hints in places around the web and coming to the realization that this auto-comment spamming was going on I spent a bit of time today with my friend Mr. Google. With his help I found several options ranging from free (with email opt-in) to around fifty dollars. There was one forum thread that ran to 34 pages before it was locked.

There may be a place for this software, but most users don’t take the time to target the result properly. The comments placed by these softwares will only be on topic by the sheerest of luck. With the example that I saw you fill out a copy of the WordPress standard comment form and turn the software loose. The software posts the same post to all of the urls on the list. The software does not care or know if the comment is relevant.

I have seen, and see on a daily basis, the same post on multiple blogs. I first thought that people were just pasting the posts in but to do that they would have to enter the blog through the front door, find the post, go to the comment page for the post, and fill in the comment form. The server logs would show that they entered the site through a landing page and then proceeded to the comment page. Checking for the existence of this class of software cleared the mystery. The people that will use this software are unlikely to put the time in to find blogs on their subject and to produce comments that, while being general in nature, are at least on topic for the selected blogs. I recently read an article on traffic building in which the author stated that the process of blog commenting could not really be successfully automated. I agree with his opinion.

Are you plagued by auto-comment spam on your blogs? You could enter this conversation with a real comment.

I do think that Google misses some traffic, but most of the missed traffic probably shouldn’t count anyway. I think that there are people that hit the page and bounce before Analytics realizes they are there. Google instructs to place the code at the bottom of the page just before the body closing tag. That means that the Google script will be the last thing read when the page is rendered. The code is javascript, and as such could be placed in the head section of the page. It would be read before the page is actually rendered in that case and catch more of the flash thoughts.

At any rate, the information that I pick up from the logs tells much more about the server activity. In the server logs you see all of the activity of the web crawlers and spiders. There is a lot of robot activity that mostly never shows in Analytics because the pages are not actually opened, just downloaded to the indexing server.

On my blogs I also see some other traffic that does not show up in analytics. These are the tracks of the comment spammers. I have come to the conclusion that there is a list somewhere of direct addresses to comment pages of blogs. These comment spammers come in through the back door directly to the comment page. They leave their spam comments without ever reading a post or visiting the actual blog. Probably some or most of these are automated. They all leave their tracks in the server log.

This blog has now been hit over 6,000 times with comment spam. I don’t have to deal with most of that because my anti-spam software dumps many of them directly. It does leave a few for my decision. In most cases I choose ‘delete permanently’ but if there is some relation to an actual post I occasionally approve one.

I have recently posted a comment guideline page on all of my blogs. That will not make any difference to the comment spammers, but the fact that the page is there makes me feel better about deleting the spam.

Blog commenting is a viable way to attract traffic to a site if it is done properly. Comments must be real and address the subject of the post. They need to add value to the post. Too many people just post something quick like “great post” and are off on their merry way. These type of comments add no value to the post or the blog, and are seldom likely to drive any traffic to the posters address.

Do you have problems with comment spam? Do you ever look at your server traffic logs? Leave a ‘quality’ comment.

When I opened the page in my web editor I found that I have not updated this site recently. So this will turn into another site rebuild. There are not that many pages, but I will bring the site up to my current standard and add some functional things to try to enhance the performance of the site. This should keep me out of mischief for this evening. Hurry over and see if you catch the site before the update is uploaded. Hurry back to see what the updated site looks like.

The other big excitement around here has to do with the comment system script that I have been using. I have seen visitors to the site that searched by name, and now I have seen a bunch of visits from some one in Kiev Ukraine that is searching for a default line in the installations. These searches are hackers or comment spammers. I have seen a couple of instances of comment spam and I found through a search that there is a hack out there for the system. I am in the process of changing the default titles and lines so that eventually they will not show up in these searches. I will definitely change those things before any new installs.

This will take some time, if ever, before the search engines will stop returning those sites. The information is already indexed, and will keep showing up in searches even after the changes are made, at least until the indexes are updated. In the mean time I will keep my eye on things.

Well, back to the grind. Have a great day!

I recently took a wiki offline because of comment spam. I suspect that there is a setting in the software to alleviate the problem, but I have not yet checked for it. If I do not find the setting I will have to check for other wiki software or take an other approach to building the knowledge base that I hope for.