Commenting and Spam

Phil Ring­nalda has an inter­est­ing post about com­ments, mod­er­a­tion and spam. As some­one who devel­oped my own blog soft­ware (part of the inter­est in run­ning a blog, as far as I’m con­cerned is in test­ing out my devel­op­ment chops), I thought long and hard about how to approach com­ments and avoid spam. My solu­tion was more restric­tive than most but works for me.

Gated Com­mu­nity

The rea­son I decided to first ask peo­ple to reg­is­ter before being able to com­ment was based on the obser­va­tion of sev­eral online com­mu­ni­ties. Metafil­ter, Slash­dot and Kuro5hin all opted for solu­tions that required reg­is­tra­tion first. Granted, requir­ing that peo­ple reg­is­ter requires some extra work and slows down the amount of peo­ple com­ment­ing but it’s based on the con­cept that most peo­ple that read a par­tic­u­lar site are return­ing vis­i­tors. A look at my server logs shows that this may largely be the case: Gen­er­ally, I get traf­fic from roughly the same ratio of sites to vis­i­tor. There must be a golden mean in here some­where as to how this works.

From there, I took one extra step, which is to require that peo­ple ver­ify their email. TNL.net users are all ver­i­fied based on an email con­nec­tion. The logic behind this approach (which may seem cum­ber­some) is that no one can claim that they didn’t know about being reg­is­tered for an account. The process is a two step process: you reg­is­ter on the site, a val­i­da­tion id is cre­ated and sent to the email address you pro­vided and once you pro­vide that val­i­da­tion id (by click­ing on a URL in the email sent to you), you’re in. This cre­ates a bar­rier of entry in that it gives me a valid email address for every user on the system.

This cre­ates a mini-gated com­mu­nity, where users can eas­ily be iden­ti­fied by the sys­tem itself.

Spam Dis-incentive

The next step (and one that I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out) is how to dis-incentivize spam­mers. Com­ment spam­ming is hap­pen­ing because URLs are sup­ported in the com­ment field. My solu­tion to this was to dis­al­low HTML as part of the entry. That should take care of it but I’m not sure that’s the answer. One thing I am con­sid­er­ing is to cre­ate a sys­tem based on the amount of com­ment­ing. If a user com­ments a lot over time, more ser­vices will become avail­able to that user as he/she becomes a more trusted party on the sys­tem (this is sim­i­lar to the mod­er­a­tion level in Slash­dot, in some way, giv­ing the user more rights/power as time goes on.) Other sug­ges­tions on this are wel­comed (in the com­ment thread )

Mon­i­tor­ing

The next ques­tion is how does one mon­i­tor that no spam is get­ting is. This is easy. Every com­ment thread has a related RSS feed and I’ve cre­ated spe­cial RSS feed which tracks ALL the com­ments on the sys­tem. This allows me to mon­i­tor new threads in the sys­tem as a whole. Should a spam­ming inci­dent hap­pen, I will be noti­fied in the feed reader of my choice.

Is my com­ment­ing sys­tem perfect?

No, it isn’t but it is some­thing that will evolve over time. As more users sign-on, the sys­tem will become more use­ful. At the cur­rent time, it’s bet­ter than the alter­na­tive I had before (lack of com­ment­ing capa­bil­ity) but it is some­thing that def­i­nitely will need work over time.