If you set up a blog, forum or customer review area on your website you are most probably looking to engage your users and looking for input back from them. Unfortunately it is pretty much guaranteed that you’ll end up with spam comments of absolute gibberish such as Iufosda fkoasdkfj sadkl;f;l or just random web links.
Spam affects both webmasters and web users in different ways. As a webmaster spam can become the bane of your online life taking up more and more time checking and deleting comments. This is necessary so that your website and brand do not get associated with the products, scams or views that spam articles often contain. As a website user you are forced to be more selective about which comments you read and this can also make following a thread or series of comments much harder if it is interspersed with spam. Users have different tolerance levels to the amount and kind of spam that they are willing to accept. This can also be different if the user is viewing a blog regularly or has come to the blog from a search engine looking for a specific solution to their query, as users looking for a solution are more likely to scan content and identify and ignore spam content quicker than a user that is reading all the comments since they last visited.
Ok so it is pretty much common sense that SPAM IS BAD, it eats away at administration time for the site and can negatively affect the sites brand. Users experience of the site is worse when there is spam so how can you cut it out. There a many ways on the web for cutting out spam comments the most effective way is to verify each post before allowing it to be published, but this can be very time consuming and can stop real time debates and discussions from users. You can implement a CAPTCHA ((C)ompletely (A)utomated (P)ublic (T)uring test to tell (C)omputers and (H)umans (A)part) where a word or phrase is converted to an image and distorted so that automated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs cannot solve them whilst humans can still read them. This approach cuts a lot of spam out but also makes the submission process more time consuming and incontinent to the most valuable users to the site, the ones are generating content for your site. Finding the best method for your site requires research and testing of the different methods that can be found on the web, but hopefully it will not be long before a solution is found that is less intrusive into the user’s experience. Our main strategies on this blog are a mathematical sum and comments are moderated by humans before they are published. What methods have you found to be most successful?
