Blogging is fun and rewarding. There are so many good things about it, but comment and trackback spam can tarnish the process. I know that going in and removing 15 different ‘prescription’ comments is not a good use of a bloggers time as they could use it towards creating new posts. But how does one control it?

You can protect comments with a captcha plugin, Spam Karma or Askimet, but what about trackbacks?

Lately I’ve been testing out the Simple Trackback Validation plugin. It checks two items to ensure that the trackback is legit.

1. It checks the page that claims to be linking to your post to ensure it does.
2. Checks the IP address of the blog the tracback is coming from and the IP of the trackback. They should be the same. In order for these to be different, a spam bot must be auto generating the trackbacks.

It also has a feature to toss any questionable trackbacks into moderation.

So far in my testing I can’t already say if it’s working or not. No trackbacks have gone into moderation, yet trackback spam seems to be more under control, but not gone.

For a new blogger, getting comments or trackbacks is exciting. However, some of them could be automated spambots filling up your comments with links to sites you wouldn’t want your visitors seeing. Spam plugins can do wonders at stopping spam, but some manual work is required. Here are a few tricks to help new bloggers identify possible spam.

1- What name did the commenter leave? Was it Sam or Jill? Or was it Used Cars or Baby Blankets? Most spammers use keyword phrases as they think it’ll help out their site; which it won’t.

2- What URL did they leave as their homepage? Does the URL look like a laundry list of keywords? http://www.shop-for-ipods.com/ipod-deals/best-ipod-prices.htm. Trying to hard is an indication that the link may be spam.

3- Was their comment generic? Sure, not everyone leaves detailed comments, but an indication of spam may be a comment such as “Great Website”,”I’m really glad I found your blog”, “This is really good content.” Chances are that these comments came from someone who never read your post.

Recently the blogs I monitor have been getting hit with a lot of spam that Akismet doesn’t seem to catch. Here is an example:

Author: used auto detroit

Comment: used auto detroit

Info about used auto detroit.

The good news is I’ve come up with a simple solution. Just go into your blogs admin, click on options and then on discussion. In the comments moderation area, add /strong to the list. Next time one of these comments make it through, they’ll be held for moderation instead of going live.

Notice, I didn’t say that this was a fix. You could add /strong to the comment blacklist area but you may filter out good comments too. Seeing as strong tags are OK to use in Wordpress comments, a real visitor could use it. Plus, some blogs tell users that they can use basic formatting. That’s why we throw it into moderation and not just throw it away.

I’ve recently been using Akismet as my spam plugin for Wordpress. It had been doing great, until this weekend. All of a sudden, spam started piling up and I was kept busy trying to remove it all. It’s amazing how great spam plugins do work, when they work. I ended up turning on Spam Karma for a while and that fixed everything.

It turns out that Akismet was down over the weekend for some updates. All should be good now though.

It really makes a person realize how great spam plugins are.  Maybe it’s time to donate a few bucks.

[tags]akismet,spam-karma[/tags]