I have had a few that have tried to spam a couple of my blogs. Nice thing with newer versions of WordPress, you can click on the ip address in the comment to catch what I like to call “frequent spammers.” This stops their fun really quick.

I think that the statistical increase in comments spam can be tied to the growth in the Internet as a whole. More people means more traffic – both good and bad. Most of us comment because we want to join in on the conversation – this way everyone wins.

The do-follow movement that you talk about seems to quickly get turned off though. It’s the automated spam bots that just troll for this type of site gets me somewhat disillusioned with this whole scenario.

I had enabled “dofollow” on one of my blogs, only to wake up the next morning to find over 800 entries to moderate, with more and more coming each day.

That way, I am sure that the particular commentator is not only a passer-by (…) And I save a lot of time moderating comments! :)

Hi Pelf,

Before turning off nofollow on this site I have considered several options and the linklove plugin was one of these.

I turned it down because of two reasons:

Passer-by commenters that have made relevant comments deserve a link as much as those who comment every post, everyone will have one link for each comment, so still it is fair with habitual commenters.
Once a bot is faster than a human to leave a comment, force them to put a certain number won’t stop them from spanning me, they would just do it more. I already had spam comments before the do-follow option so, nofollow doesn’t seem to stop them buy any measure.

I decided to moderate comments because as I put a lot of time and effort to write the posts, I thought it would be a fair investment to spend a little more and don’t allow people (and bots, of course :-) to ruin that up.

Not everyone can do it, of course. Sometimes the effort is just too big, but it has worked for me.

I wonder if the day is not far off when search engine traffic is dwarfed by social networking?

That would be like returning to the old times of paper publishing, but with the reach of internet for your content. Sounds interesting :-)

I had been reading about the so-called dofollow movement, and I can see the merit of it.

I wonder if the day is not far off when search engine traffic is dwarfed by social networking?

Cheers,

Mitch

I think rewarding valid comments is definitely a good idea. Whether you use nofollow or not, you will get spammed. Lots of spammers or looking not only for generating links, but just putting tons of links out there to get traffic.

I definetely agree with you. In my opinion there is only one ultimate solution to end spam: Manual moderation.

I know this sounds utopia when you think at enterpreneur probloggers with many blogs to take care: automation is needed. It is easier for an modest authority blogger like me.

Anyway, I think if one can afford to that, one should.

Great post, I totally agree. Please update on this, have you seen a huge increase in spam?

Actually, I haven’t seen much more spam than the usual, but I also haven’t seen a big increase on valid comments as well.

It is true that my main motivation was to reward my commenters, but I’d also be glad to see more (legit) comments.