Not necessarily smarter than the average comment spammer
I need a comment policy.
I had been gathering some comments in my spam queue that I flip-flopped on for a while. Now, I know what obvious spam is. Comments that are full of irrelevant links, or comments that are clearly not related to my post at all get deleted right away. But what confused me were the comments that seemed like they could be relevant, despite having a site listed in the Website field that existed only to hawk a product.
I went back and forth about it for a while and then consulted Twitter. There wasn’t really a consensus, but one friend of mine said, sensibly, “Aren’t they all sales websites? lol. If you are suspicious of their intentions then don’t approve them. It’s your house.”
So I approved one of them. I did so because this comment, while it could have been self-serving, did seem like it could also be contributing to my post. I approved it and thought no more about it.
Until I got another comment on another post that was exactly the same.
Well there. I got burned.
I’ve decided I’m going to craft an actual comment policy. It will say, basically, if your website is set up solely to sell your product, you’d better go out of your way to leave me a comment that is 100% relevant to my post. Not copywriting, not art, not the title of my blog. It might sound harsh (and I doubt that spammers will even read it!), but it has to be done.
What do you think? Do you have a zero-tolerance policy on comment spammers or do you often get burned like me?
(And yes, I know I might get comment spam on this post. At this point it would actually be funny, cosmically.)
Category: Uncategorized