The comment spammers got the best of Blogger Yvonne Tran (nektros, Cynicism in a hot dish). She has closed down the comment leaving ability completely, due to the massive amounts of comment spam she receives. Not even the best Wordpress plugins dealing with blogspam were able to help. Reading the announcement on her blog left me with mixed feelings about it.
I can completely understand her frustrations, as Bradsblog gets a fair dose of spam as well. (I’m certain she gets a lot more than I) However, I am one that believes that a blogger is only successful with interaction with the readership. To close comments, in my opinion, says “I’m good without you, don’t need you.”
This certainly isn’t a slam to Yvonne, as she clearly has a lot on her plate and obviously put a lot of thought into her decision. I think I’ll explore the web in search of other bloggers that have gone comment-free but I doubt I will find many. If it was a successful venture, wouldn’t it have already been done? That’s a question that Yvonne will have to find the answer to.
I will continue to read nektros, but I will miss leaving comments.
This article posted 06 04 07
June 4th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Well I wouldn’t be writing half the things on my site if I wasn’t trying to help out readers! But then again, I’m not really worried how much of a hit my readership is going to take.
But yeah, I still get about 500 spam a day in Akismet with comments CLOSED, and it’s a relief to just hit ‘Delete all’.
June 5th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
I agree with you, your blog is very much geared towards the blog readers, and i for one appreciate it. Please don’t take it as a slam to you, I just enjoyed being able to participate (even though I haven’t in a while) and was a bit disappointed that I no longer had the option.:wink:
June 6th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Glad to see your own blog back in some sort of form, Brad.
By the way, blogging is about interactivity. I’ve trapped more than 40,000 comment spam using Spam Karma. And it’s the most effective plugin I’ve ever found. And it “learns” over time too making it even better at filtering out genuine spam.
Might as well use old-style static HTML pages rather than a blog software without the interactivity.
June 6th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
So Harry, would you suggest that Yvonne simply hasn’t found the right plugin for comment spam?
June 6th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
I don’t know if she has tried Spam Karma 2. But from the amount of spam I get, it’s certainly the most effective. It prevents 99.99% of all spam and it’s not blocked a single genuine commenter yet.