The spammers win for now

I've been resisting this for weeks, but I've succumbed - this blog now has moderation in place for comments and trackbacks. This is now possible to do on a TypePad blog as a result of the service enhancements introduced by Six Apart last month.

The final straw for me was having to spend over an hour yesterday weeding out the trash and crap left on my blog by spammers. While I've not had the misfortune of suffering from a concerted spam attack, the effects of the sprinkling of rubbish left here have been about the same.

While it's often easy to spot some bulk spammers  - same IP addresses for different comments which have different names, for example - it's not so easy with those that seem to be genuine but clearly aren't when you see the comments or trackbacks. Either way, you have to review each one and manually delete each one. While I expect to still have to spend time on this, at least such crap won't see the light of day on this blog.

Sorry to do this but I don't see how else I can prevent such unwanted material being inserted here. I had thought of requiring commenters to login via TypeKey before commenting, but that seems to me to be a halfway measure and would not stop such anti-social behaviour.

I really am quite disappointed in having to do this as I believe an unmoderated environment for any blog is highly conducive for building community. Let me know if you have any thoughts about this, by email if you prefer not to wait for your comment to be moderated ;)

I will act speedily in ensuring genuine comments and trackbacks appear here as quickly as possible.

Comments

[Octavio Isaac Rojas Orduña]

In Spanish we would say: Es el precio de la fama.
It's the price of fame!

[Allan Jenkins]

It's a shame moderation became necessary... the price of success, I suppose.

I would have thought the blog hosters would take more steps to stamp it out. And Typepad seems to, though in the wrong way. Just now, attempting to log in as a Typepad user, I was told to enter a "validation code" -- even though I was recognized as a Typepad user. How odd... the security for a Typepad blog comment is tighter than for a Typepad blog post... Go figure.

Allan