Blogging 101

Spammers attack blogs through the comment box. Another effective way of controlling blog spam, therefore, is to moderate commenting. In the early days of my blogging, I never opted for moderated commenting. Discussions were more lively when allowed to flow at their own pace. But as blogging became more and more popular, I was left with no choice. There weren’t too many spam filters available back then. And the earlier spam filters were rather “primitive” compared to the kind we have today. A lot of comment-spam was still able to get through. The only option was to turn moderation on.

So, why are we talking about moderating comments when we have Akismet installed in the system? Well, nothing — not even programs — is perfect. There are a lot of anti-spam plugins available and Akismet, for me, is the best but, still, it does not work all the time. As an added precaution, commenting can be moderated. Even if a couple of comment-spam escaped Akismet, they still wouldn’t be publicly viewable if commenting is moderated. You can mark them as spam then delete them right on your administration panel.

How do we turn comment moderation on?

Click the “options” tab on the main menu of your administration panel then click the “discussion” tab in the submenu.

Please uncheck “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)” because, well, like it says, it slows down posting. It also eats a lot of my bandwidth resources, so, please uncheck it.

Towards the middle of the page, you will see the available options for turning on moderation. You may opt for some other combination by checking/unchecking the different options but what you see above works fine for me.

Towards the bottom of the page are options of moderation and blacklisting. You may not need to add anything to them right now. As the comments start to come in, you will see some patterns in web addresses, keywords and e-mail addresses and you will have a better idea what to add in the moderation and blacklist boxes.