After a long litany of being spammed with many hundreds of SPAM-comments, being publicly taunted and challenged by a spammer (or spam defender), and after months of abusive comments, I am now almost ready to turn off comments, because it is taking too much time and distracting me both from blogging and from life.
It isn’t fun to wake up in the morning to 225 spam comments, or to abusive comments meant only to irritate, insult, or attract attention. I shouldn’t have to be bothered to even delete them, and I’d rather not.
As Glenn Reynolds reminded me, some people think less of a blog because of comments on it! The logic puzzles me, because anyone who’d think less of person A because person B comes along and says something crazy or insulting is not being logical, because unless person B has intelligently and logically rebutted person A, his comments are irrelevant to A’s argument, and A is under no duty even to address them. As Mindles Dreck observed,
I don’t think a guns-blazing preaching-to-the choir rhetoric changes any minds.
Agreed. And if an inane (or blazing) comment left on a blog won’t change anyone’s mind on the merits, then why on earth should it cause anyone to think differently about the blog author? Even so, the other day I was quick to delete a comment about “sand niggers” — precisely because I thought that there might be people who’d think I approved. (UGH! Does that make me a hypocrite?) No matter how I look at the problem, it isn’t fair; in an ideal world, I shouldn’t have had to have been bothered.
But we do not live in an ideal (or fair) world….
For now, I’m going to try installing a script to turn off all old comments, but life is too short for all this comment nonsense.
Right now neither script will execute, so I may be forced to turn them off entirely.
There’s no rule I can see saying that blogs are supposed to be a public forum for anyone except the author. As Perry DeHavilland says, a blog is analogous to a home:
When you open your house to visitors, you do not give up the right to kick people out if they start insulting other guests and spray painting their opinions on the wall. Of course some people would say, “Oh but that is censorship if you stop them”. Er, no, it is just maintaining control over what is and is not acceptable on your private property… but of course some people, the sort that I am now far quicker to ban, do not actually believe in private property (not when you pin them down), and often cannot see that censorship by the state of private media channels and editorial control over a private media channel (such as a blog, for example) are materially different things. But then to someone who thinks all interaction should be political (the usual term used is ‘democratic’ these days), such distinctions make little difference to them. I am not referring here to specific people but rather the general class from which our ‘problem commenters’ tend to spring.
If a blog is like a home, I’m wondering aloud whether this blog should be more like a Roman home: a private courtyard surrounded by walls…..
UPDATE: I finally found another plugin and it seems to be working! It’s set to block all comments on posts over 21 days old, which ought to get rid of at least some of the spam comments.
Comments
11 responses to “Whose blog is this?”
Firstly, you REALLY need a Turing Test for your comments system to keep the spammers out, or at least the spambots.
We still get the occasional Quixotic manual spammer on Samizdata.net but as there are 10 of us watching the blog in relays around the clock spread over several time zones, they are lucky if their shit remain on the blog for more than 30 mins and usually we can delete them faster than they can post them, which is pretty amusing really.
There are some other very effective anti-spammer tricks I can share with you via e-mail if you like, away from the prying eyes of would-be spammers and other such digital vermin 🙂
Thank you very kindly for the advice. (I may contact you via email.) I have no problem with sincere commenters or logical comments, and I hope I can solve this problem!
Sorry to hear about your problems. I had some problems too during my last months on MovableType. Not so much for some reason since switching to WordPress. Even still, I’ve installed a plugin that only immediately posts comments from people I’ve approved in the past. Perhaps there is something similar in the MovableType world now?
Have you tried using MT Blacklist ? It’s worked really well for me.
MT Blacklist has not stopped mass comment spamming from newly created SPAMMERS; it only eases the removal of these comments, and blocks the same commenter and web site. But they just come back with a new name, and a new web site. They spring up like weeds, again and again, getting better and better at what they do. I’m afraid it’s a losing battle.
I hear what you’re saying and experienced the same thing. What I was talking about though was a “whitelist” and not a “blacklist” concept. Understand what I’m saying? (Non programmer here.)
If memory serves, Pandagon’s comments require the commenter to type in a six digit code (on the comment page) before the comment will be posted. I assume that is to discourage spammers. You might contact them to see if it works.
Judging a blogger by every commenter who gloms on to his or her blog is idiotic. Somebody said that he doesn’t blogroll Dean’s World because Mark Noonan comments there. ha! ha! Especially since Steven Malcolm Anderson is worse.
He’s right. This is a great blog, but I may stop reading it if that @$^* Steven Malcolm Anderson keeps commenting here. He’s a *&^%$#@!
Persiflage about that *&%#@ SMA aside, I should let you know that Dean Esmay is going to be installing registration for comments on his blog. All commenters will have to register. No trolls or roaches, therefore.
This whole question of comments has always been interesting to me. I don’t have comments on my blog and don’t know if oe when I will. If I do, I will certainly want the ability to screen commenters and ban trolls and roaches.
Some blogs are better with comments, some without. I like writing and reading comments on this blog. Dean’s World absolutely thrives on comments, as does Bill Whittle’s Eject! Eject! Eject! Bill Whittle turned off comments for a while because of trolls, but he has since revived them and has over a hundred comments for every post. He has gathered unto himself a little “family”, so to speak, a little Gemeinschaft, of friends who comment regularly.
Dean has long had that, too, and so does Rosemary, and I have come to know and love his World and Her realm and their inhabitants. Makes me feel cozy thinking about it now.
Not quite so many here, but you do have some who comment here fairly regularly, maybe me more than anybody.
Some blogs offer comments but hardly anybody ever comments, so it looks kind if lonely — and some very fine blogs, too. I’m thinking of Mark Wickens, in particular, a Gay Canadian Objectivist whom I like.
At the other extreme, Little Green Footballs gets about 300 comments every time he (Charles Johnson) writes anything, but I hardly ever go there because, quite frankly, the whole subject of the Muslim East and its atrocities bores me, and that’s all he ever writes about.
I first encountered you, Eric Scheie, in one of Arthur Silber’s comments, when you were just starting Classical Values, and I have been reading you ever since. I met Jeanine Ring there, too — shortly before he finally decided to close off comments. I think that was best, his blog was better without them, it didn’t really work out for him. Tragically, he is going to be hanging up his blogging shoes altogether very soon.
Some bloggers, like Eugene Volokh and his Conspiracy (uh-oh!), or Timothy Sandefur of Freespace, have always done very well without comments.
One difference, as I reflect on it, is that some bloggers write essays which are pretty much complete in themselves, while others, most notably Dean Esmay, tend to sort of throw out thoughts which just invite others to discuss and expand on them.
Most interesting it all is….
Sorry to hear you are having trouble with comments. You have one of the best comments sections out there. Have you tried registering users? I don’t know how this is done, but (if you’ll pardon the expression) Daily Kos and Noam Chomsky do that. They must be using a tool that enables them to review the comments before posting.