Spam, Ham, and Comments Oh My!

A few days ago I was wondering why I hadn’t received any comments on one of my posts. It wasn’t an exceptionally amazing post, I wasn’t expecting tens of comments, but it was still something that would garner a response or two.

Now to rewind the story, there’s some things you should know before we continue. I rarely go on my blog. I write my posts from a desktop publisher, Windows Live Writer to be exact, and I don’t need to go on my blog unless I want to change or add something. I’m on it at least once a week to see if any plugins need to be updated. Other than that, I’m only on for a few seconds to check something.

Thanks to the power of the interwebs and email, I’ll get an email if there’s a comment. I check my email in the morning and approve any comments that need to be approved. While that means I have to log into my blog, I’m almost always on my phone when I do so. It’s tiny so all I really do is click on approve or delete. I don’t search around.

fast forward to yesterday…

I log on to approve a comment and magically (seeing as I’ve never seen Spam section before, it must have sprouted overnight by magic) I see 15 comments under that category. Fifteen comments, all labeled as spam, that doesn’t seem unreasonable. I have joined in two blog hops that will garner more views, and since I’m linking my blog on two websites, that will surely lead to more spam. So I click on it, thinking it will be an easy 10 second job to delete them.

And then I  start to read……dun, dun, dun!!!

There were the obvious spam comments, nothing more than a link to their website and a quick delete. And there were the obvious actual comments, real responses to my posts that were approved and responded to.

And then there were the others. Comments that might be real responses but were just a little weird to keep me skeptical. For a lot of them you could tell that English wasn’t their first language so I was trying to figure out if it was a language barrier thing or if it was just a spam comment. IF the comment seems sort of legit but the person’s name was Air Jordan 6 on sale…that moved it over to the spam side. But the ones that killed me were the comments that had people’s names like Kira or Oliver. They could be real people that really want to reply to something I said. Or they could be spam commenters who know their comment is more likely to get through if they put an actual name.

I’ve spent the better part of an hour and a half de-spamming my two blogs. Once I got done with this blog I opened up Overflowing Bookshelves, and was shocked to see 35 “spam” comments. At least 5 of those were my own pingbacks and one was a comment on a post that I did a giveaway for. Thankfully the person didn’t qualify for the giveaway but that can’t happen again. Next time they might be eligible and it’s not fair for their entry to not be counted because it ended up in the spam folder.

I don’t want to implement CAPTCHA since I’ve heard nothing but bad things about them for blogs. And the few times I’ve had to fill one out (usually with blogspot blogs), it’s hard to read and made me less likely to comment. So now that I know that section is there, it’s been scheduled to be cleaned out once a week. No more backlog of spam!