Bubble Meter has been getting a lot of comment link spam coming from China recently, promoting World of Warcraft gold (whatever that is). This comment link spam appears on over 150,000 Blogger blog posts, and yet the folks at Google (the owner of Blogger) seem to be oblivious.Since being given administrator rights by David recently, I have been diligently deleting comment link spam, even on very old blog posts. I subscribe to Bubble Meter's comments in Google Reader, so I see the link spam and delete it within a few hours of it being posted. I can also find and delete older comment link spam by Googling for site:bubblemeter.blogspot.com "wow gold".
Deleting the link spam is kind of fun, but as I've been deleting it, the spammers have been more determined to post it. I've been trying to think of a way to defend against the spam without interrupting the ability of legitimate readers to carry on a conversation on the blog. I considered turning on comment moderation, but that would make it difficult for commenters to carry on a flowing conversation (or argument). I considered requiring commenters to have user accounts, but that would discourage casual readers from commenting. The spammers have Blogger accounts anyway, so that wouldn't work. (Unfortunately, Blogger allows people to flag blogs as hosting link spam, but it doesn't allow people to flag actual blogger user accounts as being spammers, so I have no way of bringing the spammers to Google's attention.)
It occurred to me that almost all legitimate comments appear on new blog posts, not old ones. Comments slow to a trickle on blog posts that are more than a day or two old. Meanwhile, link spammers don't really care how new or old a blog post is. Therefore, I have decided to turn on comment moderation only for blog posts that are older than three days old. This should allow legitimate readers to carry on a free-flowing conversation, while seriously impinging on the ability of spammers to abuse Bubble Meter.
Since the spammers live halfway around the world, they post the link spam when you and I are sleeping (usually around 1:00-2:00 am ET). So, another option I've considered to deter them is to turn off comments at night, and turn them back on in the morning.
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