spam
Miscellany

Dear Disqus, Here’s a Simple Way to Slow Down Spam

June 21, 2012

spam

One of my responsibilities at Search Engine Land and Marketing Land is to monitor the comments on both sites as much as possible. I usually check 2-4 times per day to make sure our community guidelines are being followed and to keep an eye on spam.

We recently switched to Disqus on both sites for our comment system, and while comments have increased since then, so, too, has the amount of spam we get. Ugh.

What’s frustrating about it is that there’s a simple fix that would cut down on probably 80 percent of all the spam we see on both sites: limit the number of comments a new Disqus user can post.

The vast majority of spam we get is from users like this:

disqus-spam

disqus-spam-2

disqus-spam-3

Seriously, if you’re leaving more than 5-10 comments on your first day with an account, I bet chances are pretty good that you’re spamming. But 182? 223? 303? On the first day? Wow….

Yes, I’ve blacklisted all of these accounts and yes, I’ve made this suggestion to Disqus via their feedback system. Fingers crossed someone’s listening.

8 Comments

  • Reply Tyler Hayes June 22, 2012 at 12:31 pm

    We’re always listening. And we always appreciate feedback (especially of the actionable variety, like this). Thanks a bunch for your thoughts Matt, we’ll keep them in mind as we continue to improve our spam solution.

  • Reply Matt McGee June 22, 2012 at 1:10 pm

    Thanks for checking in, Tyler — much appreciated. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. 🙂

  • Reply Marketing Day: June 22, 2012 June 22, 2012 at 1:59 pm

    […] Dear Disqus, Here’s a Simple Way to Slow Down Spam, http://www.mattmcgee.com […]

  • Reply Darin "Doc" Berntson June 22, 2012 at 4:20 pm

    Matt, I am anxious to hear more about your experience with Disqus.

    We are evaluating the platform for our site… but have yet to make a decision. Will be good to know more of the good, the bad and the ugly.

    How about a review post? I have read many others, but would like to know your thoughts.

    Have a great weekend!

    Doc

  • Reply Tyler Hayes June 22, 2012 at 5:47 pm

    Doc, feel free to toss any questions or thoughts our way any time at http://disqus.com/support or http://twitter.com/disqushelp too — we’re always happy to lend a hand!

  • Reply Jasjot Bains June 23, 2012 at 9:56 am

    One great reason not to use Disqus. I used it on my site, got hit by crappy spam like this. Reverted back to original WP comments form and installed Akismet. One click to remove spam and AKismet is correct 99.7% of the times !

  • Reply Tyler Hayes June 24, 2012 at 3:17 pm

    Jasjot, are you seeing spam on this page? I see a total of 6 six comments (7 once I post this) on this page and all are legitimate comments.

    Either way, sorry to hear you had spam issues when using Disqus. I’m not sure how long ago you used Disqus but rest assured we’ve made a number of improvements to our spam filtering solution over the years. And we will continue to do so. You can also enable Akismet within Disqus as well, to get protection from both our network-wide filter and Akismet.

    If you have any other questions or feedback with which we can help don’t hesitate to contact our support team at http://disqus.com/support. We’re always happy to help.

  • Reply Daniel15 September 23, 2012 at 1:58 am

    Jasjot, you do realise you can use Akismet with Disqus, right? This would give you the exact same spam protection as Disqus with WordPress would.

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