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Website comment spam
Hi everyone,
You may have noticed form time to time that there's spam in the comments of the main website. This has increasingly become a problem.
Once upon a time we had spam filtering - but these work by sending commenter details to a 3rd party which was in breach of our privacy statement. So we turned off such filtering.
We also used to use comment moderation for anonymous commenters - but weren't very proactive at moderating comments at times. So we switched to no moderation. That's how so much spam got in.
We used to regularly delete spam - but again were not always as proactive as we'd like about that.
Yesterday I turned anonymous comment moderation back on and in less than 24 hours there were already 600+ new comments to moderate - all spam! I also deleted many many (in the thousands!!!) existing spam comments.
But where do we go from here?
Do we stick with infrequent moderation and accept it means some valid comments won't be posted in a reasonable time-frame?
Do we revisit our privacy statement and amend it to be compatible with 3rd-party spam filtering services?
You may have noticed form time to time that there's spam in the comments of the main website. This has increasingly become a problem.
Once upon a time we had spam filtering - but these work by sending commenter details to a 3rd party which was in breach of our privacy statement. So we turned off such filtering.
We also used to use comment moderation for anonymous commenters - but weren't very proactive at moderating comments at times. So we switched to no moderation. That's how so much spam got in.
We used to regularly delete spam - but again were not always as proactive as we'd like about that.
Yesterday I turned anonymous comment moderation back on and in less than 24 hours there were already 600+ new comments to moderate - all spam! I also deleted many many (in the thousands!!!) existing spam comments.
But where do we go from here?
Do we stick with infrequent moderation and accept it means some valid comments won't be posted in a reasonable time-frame?
Do we revisit our privacy statement and amend it to be compatible with 3rd-party spam filtering services?
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Comments
But that still leaves the spam problem. I'd be interested to know the ratio of genuine non-spam comments between logged-in users and anonymous users. I think I could tolerate a reasonable delay for anon comments to be posted. Can anyone create an account on the main site or is it just for members?
So, I'd put up with #2. I'm not sure how much data is actually getting sent to Google via reCAPTCHA, but there's got to be ways to find out.
8k~ Comments atm
It would also remove the need to think about whether site membership requires party membership. The forums should be (and AFAIK, are) free for anyone to join.
Moving discussion to the form I think requires an account doesn't it? I don't know how it works.