On Blogs, Blog Commenting, and GitAtom

2022-08-12 00:13:20 PDT

The problem of commenting on blogs is bigger than many non-bloggers realize, I think.

I wrote a blog for many years in the now-distant past. My blog collapsed for technical reasons that I will cover in a future post. (I have written many blogs. This was just the big one.)

Perhaps the largest non-technical problem I had was dealing with blog comment spam. I got a high enough pagerank back then that I'd get on the average of a spam comment or two a day. Real comments were pretty rare except on one vaguely viral post.

The spam I was seeing looked like it had been generated by an extremely low-paid human. I had enough captchas and whatnot in place to make it hard-ish for a bot to comment, and the comment content seemed to be vaguely customized.

For me as a casual blogger this constant drip of spam was painful. I eventually shut off comments. Now I'm up again on GitAtom, which lacks any comment facilities. What should I do?

My cousin uses some free version of Disqus for blog comments. I could conceivably set that up. I have no idea how well it would cut the spam down; I have mixed feelings about Disqus itself. There are various open source alternatives around. I could look into those, I guess.

There's various friendzone / pre-approval things I could do. I really do like the world to be able to legit comment though.

I've thought about taking advantage of Gmail's decent spam filtering. I could request that comments be sent by email to some dedicated Gmail account, then either manually or automatically forward them to GitAtom if they missed the filter. A lot of work, but might be worth it.

What do you think? Post your answer below… Nah, just kidding. You can always email me if you like. I'll try to pass on the good stuff here.