This blog receives tens of spam comments every day and I spam each of them manually. Basically I identify them by the senders and content of the comments.

Currently, when someone leave a comment on my blog, the comment does not appear at once. The system will then send me a notification and I will look at the comment and approve/disapprove/spam it. There is an exception when the sender has commented before and the comment has been approved, in this case, the system remembers the sender and all further comments by that sender are automatically approved and displayed at once.

Today, I found that someone (or robot) left me a comment like this:

I discovered your homepage by coincidence.
Very interesting posts and well written.
I will put your site on my blogroll. :-)

The sender is someone I do not recognize (both name and email address). From the content, apparently, this person (or robot, again) is a stranger, so it is natural that I don’t recognize him/her/it. I had to decide what to do with this comment and sender. Since the sender uses an email address of a strange host (something like “financial4u.com”) and the content generally apply to any blog on any post, I decided to spam it (if I approve it, next time any comment from this sender will be posted to my blog right away). Is it really a spam? I do not know. I only took the safer approach.

I do welcome random visitors, but not spam. I am not willing to block all comments from whom I do not know, nor to allow only some author to comment. So, if you are true people who really want to comment but not distributing junks, please follow a little bit guidelines when commenting:

  1. Use a valid email address (which will be invisible to everyone but me)
  2. Use a name that I can recognize, when possible. However, I still allow non-infringing nicknames for keeping anonymous.
  3. Relate the content. Basically, if you do not want me to wrongly distinguish you as spam, show me that you are not.

Easy, isn’t it?

If you have any suggestion on the guidelines or distinguishing spam, please feel free to leave me comments.