While this does not deal with medical issues, it is an important issue for anyone doing a medical blog.  If the blog site becomes chocked with irrelevant comments, readers will not be able to decipher the important comments that helps us all learn and communicate new ideas.  Therefore, I am bringing this important issue to you…How do we stop the spam comments?!

You know the sinking and anxiety-ridden feeling of waking up one day and finding 70 thousand comments waiting for approval in your inbox from your blog site. After leafing through a few of them, you realize, you have been targeted for a major spam campaign. How are you going to go through them.  The beads of sweat begin to form on your brow and the heart races.

While this is never pleasant, it helps you realize that there ARE ways to protect yourself and that IT’S TIME!

There are 7 filters available for your blog posts if you use wordpress:

  1. Akismet: normally comes bundled with WordPress but you must activate it by signing up for an API key with WordPress.com
  2. Simple CAPTCHA: adds a CAPTCHA code to the comment area where a person needs to enter the code displayed which is meant to eliminate the comments by bots
  3. Defensio.com: this is a  plugin that supports Open ID. The RSS feed is supplied for botgh good and bad comments
  4. Bad Behavior: works PHP based websites to prevent automated systems from creating havoc on your sites on WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal and others
  5. Spam Karma 2: assigns a score based on the email address, age of post and their link.  The higher the comment score, the better.
  6. WP Spam Hitman: fights spam by defined criteria involving patterns and points
  7. Simple Trackback Validation: tries to validate the trackbacks so only the legit ones appear on your site.

While you may not be able to blast away all the existing fodder, at least you can prevent future disasters.

Unfortunately, I am speaking from experience. The thought of the half a million comments in the inbox makes me nauseas every time. Have you added protection for your site?  What have you done?