31 January 2013

• A Proposal to Reduce Xanga Spam

  My blog receives an ever-increasing quantity of spam comments. The comments are usually incoherent, sometimes just text copied from my entry, and always include a link to whatever site the commenter is trying to promote. These comments take a lot of time to delete and are annoying. This seems like a problem that Xanga should be able to help us solve or, at least, manage.

  

  What current options exist to help me deal with this spam? I could enable the sign-in lock feature, but many of the commenters set up a Xanga profile before commenting. I could enable friends lock, but that restricts people who want to view my blog without signing up for Xanga and sending me a friend request. My grandparents, for example. 

  I’ve thought of two potential solutions that Xanga could implement:

  • Introduce a feature, similar to YouTube’s and other blogging sites’, where comments must first be approved before being posted. This moderation would make it easier to quickly delete spam comments.
  • Alternatively, any comments that contain a link in them (or, alternatively, comments that contain a link and are from someone without a Xanga username or with a relatively new Xanga username) are flagged as potential spam and are sent to a spam folder, much in the same way that email providers flag potential spam.

  What do you think? Have you had a problem with spam comments on your site? How do you think it should be dealt with?

  • 23:08
  • 58 Comments