Due to spam, you now need to register to be able to post a comment
Like most blogs, BloggingTips gets it’s fair share of spam. It’s a real pain in the ass but up until now it’s not been a major hassle for me.
At the start of this blog’s life Akismet was catching just about every spam comment which was left. A few months ago I was getting 2 or 3 spam comments left on posts. This didn’t really bother me, I simply marked those comments as spam. Unfortunately, the last few weeks the spam at BloggingTips has been crazy. Akismet is still catching some spam comments but in the last week or so the blog has been getting around 40-60 spam comments per day posted on articles (most of which are advertising software or sex products!).
I noticed that most spam comments were being left on older posts so my assumption was that they were being spammed because they were listed on a lot of search engines. So my initial plan was to close posts which were older than a few months - of course, this woudln’t have been the perfect solution but a quick fix to an ever growing problem.
However, I received many spam comments today on posts which were only a week or so old therefore I feel like I have no alternative at this time but to only allow comments from those who register. I know it’s a real pain to have to register somewhere to comment so apologies to you all for that but I don’t believe there is anything else I can do 
Blogs like Tyler Cruz only allow registers users to comment and I don’t believe comments have decreased too much because of it so hopefully the same will be true here.
If your blog has had a huge spam problem like this and you somehow got it resolved please leave a comment. I’d love to hear how you got rid of those damn spammers!!! 
Vincent | December 13th, 2007 at 8:54 pm #
I’m now registered and ready to comment
tylercruz | December 14th, 2007 at 3:14 am #
I actually removed the registration of commenting shortly after my new new theme was launched.
I had required registration because I was not just getting spam, but really rude comments as well. I normally allow negative comments, but when they start getting personal and just obnoxiously rude, that’s going too far. Worst of all, is that people were ’spoofing’ other people’s names, pretending to be me, for example.
I switched between registration requirements several times, and I can tell you that in my case, people really do hate having to register to comment, even though it literally takes a couple seconds (Took me maybe 5 seconds to register on this blog). You will find your comments to drop by about a third when you require registration… now that I don’t require registration anymore, I get 15-35+ comments on average per post.
In my case, I guess I was “lucky” and all the real bad commenters finally ceased and gave up. There are still some, but nowhere near as bad as they used to be.
Anyhow, it sounds like most of your spam is coming from bots… have you tried setting Akismet to catch any comments that contain more than 3 links? I did this, as commentors rarely post 4+ links in a comment, and it helped a ton.
On a side note, I’m 994 RSS right now.. hoping to hit 1,000 finally and catch up to you, but you’re always one step ahead of me… grrr…
kingkong | December 14th, 2007 at 3:30 am #
i have experienced the same thing really with my blog. nothing is stopping them i think askimet needs to be updated for the new spam!
Kevin | December 14th, 2007 at 9:04 am #
Yeah I think comments will decrease here a little because of it. At the moment I have it set that anything more than 2 links will be flagged for moderation however hardly any of the spam comments actually had links in the comment ie. their link was placed in the url field
Here’s an example of one
There is an option to ‘Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.’ on Akismet. Perhaps this would help with it a little.
Tyler - I’m sure you’ll reach 1,000 before the end of the year
shank098 | December 14th, 2007 at 10:35 am #
You may want to check out a spam filtering product from Denfensio. I have been using it on my photoblog for awhile now and its working just great. Even better? It’s free!
It’s worked so well on my photoblog site, I am considering installing it on another blog of mine.
Definitely worth a look,
Brett
Michael Martine | December 14th, 2007 at 2:25 pm #
Are you using Bad Behavior? It blocks a lot of bots before they can even touch your server. It just bounces them away.
Kevin | December 14th, 2007 at 9:53 pm #
I’m not using any spam comment blocker just now other than akismet. I’ll have to check those ones out
Vincent | December 15th, 2007 at 5:06 pm #
Looks like the comments have died down naturally, but it seems as thought there were not that many in the start. I think it looks as if people are just happy enough to sit back and reflect then just start commenting
Deborah Ng | December 16th, 2007 at 9:52 am #
Askimet usually catches them for me, but I have noticed an increase in spammy comments on all my blogs. What I do for FWJ is to enable moderation for a first comment only. If that comment is approved, the ocmmenter can comment freely after that.
Good luck with the spam issue. It’s so annoying!
Baz L | December 25th, 2007 at 1:38 pm #
Spam Karma seems to work well enough for me.
You can set it up to weight spam based on how many links it contains, how old the post is, etc.