Avoiding Spam Comments – Keeping Crooks at Bay

Open up your blog or your site as a whole to comments and you open yourself up to crooks – it’s as simple as that. We’ve all seen millions of examples of bogus comments by now – as in those annoying responses where the party behind it is clearly trying to sell something or infect you with a world of viruses.“Great post! Listen, my brother now earns more than $40,000 per hour doing nothing but click a single button every week – take a look how he does it at www.youreamoron.com”.         The trouble is, you absolutely must open a two-way channel of communication with your site’s visitors if you want to strike up meaningful conversation, discussion and all-important trust. But as soon as you do, you end up with dozens of comments like the one above and really don’t have the time to sit monitoring your site 24/7 for if and when this kind of thing happens.Which begs the question – what can you do to filter out the garbage?Well, first you need to understand the sources of these spam comments – they don’t all come from crazies with nothing better to do than type detritus all day and night. In fact, most come from automated bots that do nothing but pepper the web with utter drivel for the benefit of some lazy and immoral soul on the other end of the equation. This is precisely why responding to or trying to get in contact with the writers of any of these posts is futile – don’t waste your time.One of the best ways of filtering out any and all bum comments from your site is to refuse to accept any comments from anonymous sources. It’s very rare for spam comments to be left if the writer has to leave their real-life details behind, which could be as simple as their name and email address. Doing this will immediately reduce the scale of the problem in a big way.You could even go one step further and introduce a Captcha system for your site, which is the password box-type thing that asks you to retype a series of letters or numbers before allowing you in. These are to a large extent bot-proof and trolls don’t generally have the dedication to fight them.Something else of value is the text filter plugin, which not only ensures that all offensive language is barred from your comments sections as a whole, but can also be tailored to outlaw any words or phrases of your choice. There’s always a way around these things, but they serve a pretty decent purpose nonetheless.There is one warning to take away from the debate however – don’t’ ever cross the line into censoring your genuine audience members to an OTT extent. Even if it seems as though someone is for some reason becoming deliberately confrontational, you can easily turn this into a positive by cooling the situation and converting them into a happy shopper.The worst thing you can do is fight back or start deleting all negative comments – you’ll only end up losing respect with those previously on your side.