Tuesday, October 02, 2012

no more moderation!

I've decided to take off the comments moderation feature - at least for the rest of the month, to see how it goes. So from now on, your comments should appear straight away.

copyright Warner Bros Animation
The only reason I was moderating comments was to try to cut down on the amount of spam (quite a lot, as it goes). I should be able to delete the spam when it crops up, but it does mean that stuff I haven't approved may pop up from time to time - so apologies in advance.

Like I say - we'll see how it goes!

Thanks again for all your comments. Very much appreciated.

11 comments:

Elaine Denning said...

Like you said, see how it goes, but for me personally it's a good move :) I really hope people treat your space with the respect it deserves.

Spence Kennedy said...

Yay! It works!

Funnily enough - I was just trying to get the Hong Kong Phooey pic to link to the Warner Bros site, but ah just cain't do it, ah simply cain't.

Elaine Denning said...

Lol! Save that for another day, eh? :)

Philip Dodd said...

Good decision! Causes no prob on mine now. Just got to do the behind the scenes work. The moderation stuff is becoming so indecipherable nowadays. I hope you get more comments as a result.

Spence Kennedy said...

Good to hear you haven't been snowed with spam, Philip. I prob should've done it a long time ago. Nice work, Elaine.
Now type these characters: a2 - or is that a z? - 3, is it? z again. No. *!)8/£#

Baglady said...

I agree. I get more problems when I open my blog to anonymous comments than when I switch off moderation.

Spence Kennedy said...

Thanks Baglady. It definitely looks like the way to go!

Daniel Rutter said...

It's odd that Blogger doesn't seem to offer any robust anti-comment-spam system. You'd think Google could roll their own Akismet-like thingy. All you seem to be able to do, though...
http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42064
...is moderate, or allow free posting, or allow free posting with a captcha. Captchas aren't USELESS, but they're hardly best-practice these days.

If you get hit by "serious" spammers I suppose you'll just have to turn moderation back on. I hope there's some way to get rid of bulk comments, because some spammers are VERY prolific. For ages on my blog (when it was dansdata.blogsome.com; now it's howtospotapsychopath.com), I had spammers that would create scores, possibly hundreds, of user accounts per day, but who couldn't figure out the captcha system and so never actually posted any spam. But boy, did they make a mess of my user-list page, and Blogsome, who offered semi-proprietary Wordpress hosting, didn't let me kill those accounts en masse. The current version of the blog has a standard Wordpress install and works much better.

Spence Kennedy said...

Thanks Daniel. I've not heard of Akismet - will check it out. The whole business of spamming is bizarre (and infuriating). Do the people who create that stuff really think anyone will go to those sites / buy those things? It just seems like such an anti-social and anti-productive thing to do. Since I turned off the moderation yesterday I've only had one, though, so that's not bad. I'll see how it goes. But it feels better not having moderation.

Cheers for the comment, Daniel.

jacksofbuxton said...

Hopefully there will be no spam or any other such nonsense on here Spence.

Hopefully no-one will be,say,trying to flog their book on here.

Spence Kennedy said...

Well there's been a few overnight, but so far Google seems to have been pretty good at stuffing them straight in the spam box (apart from one I had to do manually). So far so good.

It's incredible what they'll try to flog - viagra, handbags, books. They've got some nerve...