Saturday

Praise for Blogger's Spam Blocker

Screenshot of Blogger's new spam filter in action Left: Screenshot of Blogger's new spam filter in action

I was pleased to notice that Blogger now offers a spam filter feature for its blogging platform. The service allows website owners who use Blogger to weed out much of the comment spam that spambots and human spammers spew across the blogosphere.

Over the years this site has drawn its share of attention from spammers, and in the past I have periodically had to shut off the commenting feature to combat persistent spammers. With the new service a blogger can delete dozens of spam messages with a single click, which is much faster than the old method of having to hunt down and individually remove spam from blog posts.

The one down side to Blogger's spam filter is that you have to activate comment moderation, which is located under the Settings tab. One way to avoid having to moderate every comment is to set the comment moderation only for older posts, such as those 30 days or older. Chances are the spammers are being attracted to your site by some older post anyways, so this is really not an inconvenience.

In a sweep of some older posts, I was able to remove over 200 spam comments dating back to December 2009. Some folks might not mind their website being cluttered with Viagra or Cialis advertisements, but it annoys the heck out of me to allow these spammers to hijack my PageRank for free, so kudos to Blogger for creating this excellent tool.