Jetpack Comments makes use of javascript and iframes, which are both a bit too complicated for most spam bots, and that does line up with the almost complete lack of obvious bot-generated spam in our spam queue. Besides the comforting bot-breaking ability of Jetpack Comments, I have a feeling that our change from a basic form element comment form to the comment_form tag finally enabled our other anti-spam plugins to work properly. I honestly haven’t tested that last bit, because I really have no wish to open the flood gates again.

For the record, we use Akismet, CloudFlare, Cookies for Comments, and now Jetpack Comments to keep spam off of this site.

We decided to do away with the above setting and rely entirely on Akismet, Cookies for Comments, and the built-in moderation list and blacklist at Settings -> Discussion for any that snuck through. Prior to this change, we had an average of 5 pending comments each hour, and an average of 4.8 of those were spam. Now, we don’t have to monitor pending comments, and we only see an average of 2 comments an hour making it through. Of course, an average of 1.5 of these are spam, but that’s still one heck of an improvement, and we should eventually knock that down with the moderation list and blacklist. So far, the advantages outweigh the few that are making it through.

• As mentioned, we have much less posted comments to deal with now than there were pending comments before.
• Checking each comment as it comes in forces us to accept more comments that really ride the line between legitimate and spam comments. In the past, we would have probably bulk-spammed these when checking the pending comments.
• Legitimate commenters can see their comments immediately without waiting for us to get to them.

A word of warning about the moderation list and blacklist. They will both block anything that matches the string of letters you enter. So, be mindful of collateral damage when blocking a word. For example, one of the most commonly blocked words is “cialis,” but this will also block “socialist.” The blacklist will automatically mark any matching comment as spam, so use the moderation list for any words that could be used legitimately.

If you find yourself interacting too much with spam on a daily basis, it might be time to consider a new strategy.

When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.

If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.

Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern monitoring, the Akismet team can easily track the source of these parasite spammers and notify the site’s owner, but there’s little they can do if they can’t get in touch with you. Since contact forms can break without warning, the Akismet team recommends that you provide a traditional abuse@yourdomain email address. If you don’t want to make this email address public, at least contact Akismet and have it placed on file.

Are you using Akismet on your social network or online publishing service? With so many options available, why not try it today? Parasite spam can hit almost any site driven by user content, so don’t forget to offer your contact information to the Akismet team.

But our little blog gets a lot of attention from spammers. We are listed on web pages that pin point nofollow blogs for spamming, splogs regularly repost our content and send us trackbacks and well disguised comments are often adorned with links to completely unrelated sites. Moderating comments takes a lot of effort from all of us (we are working on making this process simpler, stay tuned) and even then, some weirdness and mistakes slip past us. We have recently started noticing a lot of comments that seem mildly relevant but link to SEO sites or completely unrelated content that keeps changing.

Do you change your commenters’ URI often when posting comments? Are you under the impression that leaving comments with different links will give those links more exposure? Do you use Short URLs to get around comment spam restrictions? More importantly, how many of you force yourself to comment to just spread your links around? Have you ever left a comment just to increase your comment count? Are you an SEO professional who regularly comments on blogs for SEO purposes? You might be doing yourself (and us) more harm than good.

While we try our best to allow any and all relevant comments to be posted, we do actively remove suspicious comments. We make spam/spammer judgment calls every day, but spam is annoying and nasty and in my opinion, spam is like a leech that sucks off the goodness and leaves the host with nothing in return. It often clogs up the conversation and reduces relevancy. Just look at the latest comments on any old(er) blog with a popular post that has not been pruned and taken care of.

We do however, actively promote, reward and encourage passionate comments. If you feel that we have missed a comment that should have been posted, please contact us. However, if you are changing your link on every comment and linking to various websites around the internet who have paid you for your SEO services, please do not send us an email asking us to approve them. Mostly, dont be evil and smug!

How do you treat suspicious comments that have not been caught by Akismet? We manually visit every comment waiting for moderation and actively remove suspicious comments and any older ones that might be related. It takes time but it is worth it.

How do you reward your commenters? We use Highlight Author Comments and hacked up versions of various plugins for heuristics.

Do you import comments from other places on the web? No. We do not import comments from anywhere. The conversation is much more focused and we concentrate on quality versus quantity. We hope that our content, subject and demeanor encourage and crystallize commenting and participation. Other conversations about our posts on apps such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter add nothing but noise wherein the real conversation in live comments get drowned out. I used to think that Trackbacks belonged in the comment flow. I have since changed my opinion after dealing with some posts with hundreds of comments.

Do you turn off comments on old posts? No. Old posts are gems. Conversations can get started on old topics and need to be allowed.

What do you do?

I would like to preface this discussion by saying that I screwed up the install by adding this blog onto the wrong account and that added to some of our woes. The account bug that followed (we received some help via the support email) was caused by my fat fingering.

• Better overall look and feel of the comment section of a blog: I liked the look and feel. The AJAX interface is spiffy and quite versatile.
• Commenter reputation: I really like this feature and this was one of my top priorities for installing ID. I like it and it worked well. Add this to “last post of commenter” and it is a killer feature to give good commenters some free publicity.
• Comment voting: Useful for readers who want to join the discussion. Also very useful to determine spamminess of a comment. I found it to add to the community feel and found myself looking for votes on comments in hot posts.
• Social commenting: I saw a bunch of people use various types of profiles to log in and comment. I think this feature added interesting bits of information about commenters and might have prompted more readers to comment. I cannot say for sure. I had trouble staying logged in because of my fat fingering and caused myself some headaches.
• Reply to comments by Email: Useful feature. Did any of my readers use it? I have no clue. Did I use it? No.
• Automatic folding of threads: Does it work? Yes! Does it have the desired effect? No. On Weblog Tools Collection, automatic comment thread folding meant that a lot of relevant comments were overlooked by readers who ended up saying the same things over again and missing much of the conversation. It just did not have the right feel.
• Comment synchronization with the blog: We were able to roll back to the default commenting system because of this feature and are thankful for that. But the comments on hot/active posts were not quite at par with actual activity on the posts. This lack of real time updates resulted in less comments and conversations.
• Ability to add polls to comments: Cool feature in concept, barely used in reality. A relevant poll added to a hot post might get a few results but readers don’t use that kind of interactivity unless they want to come back and check the results, which is often not the case. Can be done with a plugin.
• Better spam filtering and moderation features: ID adds the ability to use their own filters in addition to Akismet. But I found these to be cumbersome and Akismet not as responsive. I can’t quite explain this gripe but I can say that too many comments were ending up in moderation and not enough of the ones that I marked as spam were then treated as spam on subsequent attempts. I don’t think the WordPress feature that allows previous commenters’ comments to be posted without moderation works with IS. Blacklisted words did not appear to work as well as I have come to expect them to work. There is also no way to “remember me” on the ID login page, which is annoying.  Having to add co-authors on as admins of the blog on ID meant they got bugged with all the Spam and also meant that they had to be registered users. These reasons were probably the most annoying to me and my fellow authors and resulted in us backing out.
• Ability to record video comments: Cool feature but not used at all on this blog. I see some video comments on TechCrunch but our readers just did not care.
• Better comment curation for multi-author blogs: There is no way to send moderation emails to individual authors (which is a pain for multi-author blogs) and the moderation emails were just unfamiliar and not easy to get used to. Again, not fast enough in moderation and approval of comments.

In addition to the good and the bad above, I also received some disturbing feedback which suggested that some people would not comment on a blog that runs Intense Debate. I have no such qualm and would really like to hear from folks who feel this way. Why this angst?

In conclusion I have to say that I think Intense Debate was a mixed bag for us. If you are not thoroughly used to the WordPress comments system and do not have tens of thousands of comments, it is worth a shot. The ability to roll back is fantastic for buyers’ remorse and I think there is a lot of potential.

UPDATE: And deactivating the plugin was not enough to stop it from acting upon incoming comments. Comments were borked since ID was deactivated yesterday. The plugin files have now been deleted and that seems to allow comments to flow back through. Sorry for the trouble.

The beauty of Project Honey Pot is that anyone can contribute : just register an account, download the script and put it somewhere on your blog. It’s been more effective than I would have thought and wished : the day I had my first honeypot installed, it detected a new and before unseen comment spammer.

Contributing to this project is an easy way of making the web a cleaner place, and it will also benefit to another WordPress related spam-fighting project : the almighty Bad Behavior will soon implement the http:BL API.

Using the API itself is fairly easy. I’ve written a short tutorial, Honey Pot & http:BL Simple PHP Script, showing how to use the API to increase protection around your beloved blog. And for those who are not interested in writing their own script, there is already an http:BL WordPress Plugin waiting for you.