How hard is it for a paid “professional” blogger to have a spam-controlling comments feature?
Apparently it’s just too much for either Kevin Drum, blogger of the political magazine Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, or WM’s editorial masters.
In the last week or so, his blog comments have gotten hugely overrun by long-winded trolls and thread hijackers.
I e-mailed Kevin, and sent a separate e-mail to WM contact e-mails, requesting they install some anti-spam comments features. I said that, if not, I could delink Political Animal, one of just two high-hit liberal blogs on my linkroll. And that I could post to his blog suggesting other bloggers do the same, even if the action were nothing more than symbolic.
Drum e-mailed back in high dudgeon. When I sent a second e-mail saying it was nothing personal, but that, even as a symbol, I couldn’t think of how else to stress the issue. Ironically, Drum had a blog post two days ago about how spam volume has doubled in the last year.
Well, troll comments on posts are akin to spam.
And, he and/or his masters don’t even have to pay to fix this.
I added to my blogs the Haloscan comments software, which is free, in large part because it does give me some comments control. Haloscan has a maximum length limit on comments, and … it lets me ban posters by IP address. Enough said.
So, Kevin, if you want to get all huffy, fine. I’ll go ahead and take care of the linkage issue now.
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