Managing Spam Comments In Wordpress and Joomla
Some of the sites mentioned in this post belong to friends of mine who use Wordpress not Joomla – However the same issues apply to those of us who run Joomla sites and choose to use a comments plugin.
My friend RT has written an interesting post on the pros and cons of dofollow versus nofollow.
His post sparked quite a bit of discussion on the issue and many commented on the large amount of spam that ensues when a blog is ‘dofollowed’. Frank Carr also pointed out that when he ran dofollow on his earn online cash blog his site was then picked up and added to various ‘dofollow’ blog list around the interweb – this in turn resulted in poor quality traffic and a deluge of spammers.
So what can you do? Well it seems the tide may be turning against dofollow amongst its stalwart followers, I have been a supporter but sadly reverted to nofollow a few weeks back – the spam was just overwhelming me. When you run dofollow many of the spam posts will be from real people, not bots, and spam filters have a very tricky time picking these up.
Akismet has actually worked quite well for me. I have a blog where I played with feeding RSS feeds into wordpress posts – using the wp-o-matic plugin.
I didn’t really check the comments on the blog for a few months as the project was just an experiment on something very different… But when I did look a couple of months later there were 900+ comments in the queue!
So I installed Akismet, which is a wordpress spam filter that provides a ‘check for spam’ button in the comments window. This scans all your existing, unapproved comments, not just the new ones.
Akismet moved all but 3 of the 900+ comments to the spam folder.
I did a double check by manually looking at 3-4 pages in the spam folder and they were definitely spam. The 3 non-spam comments were valid.
Akismet did a good job in this case.
If you are using Joomla this may end up being a major issue for you as all the comment components are 3rd party, and to my knowledge none have particularly robust spam moderation features.
Do let me know if you are running comments in Joomla and have any interesting methods to combat spam, has anyone looked at implementing Akismet for Joomla?
Should I Use Joomla Or Wordpress?
Now I could be wrong about this but I believe there are two groups of people who read this blog. There are those who are interested in Joomla Templates, and have arrived from the main site. And those who have come from search engines or from some of the niche marketing circles I have been frequenting.
If you are part of the first group, those who love Joomla, own a Joomla website, or want to build a Joomla website then you may be wondering what this blog is based on. Yes you probably guessed correctly, it’s WordPress.
I am big fan of Joomla and I believe it is an excellent choice for many types of websites, but I also believe that you should pick your CMS based on what you intend to use it for and what you want to achieve.
WordPress is an excellent framework to quickly publish your thoughts and ideas to the web and I’ve chosen it for the JoomlaBear blog because I believe it is the most efficient tool for my purposes.
The main site at joomlabear.com is based on Joomla – Joomla 1.0.15 to be precise, and will very shortly be upgraded to Joomla 1.5.9.
So when to use Joomla and when to use WordPress? Well that is something I will be addressing in future posts because I think it’s an important topic and could save many of us days or weeks of grief in the long run if we choose the correct CMS framework that best matches our site’s purpose.
A strength of each system, off the top of my head:
Joomla’s user management which is built in and allows for user registration on your site out-of-the-box. Includes user email authentication, i.e the user must click a link in a n email they receive before their account is activated. Once registered a user will be able to use other components integrated into teh Joomla site such as forums, etc.
Wordpress on the other hand has an incredibly powerful commenting system which is built in – and for which I do not believe there is anything yet for Joomla that compares – not when spam protection and other factors are taken into consideration.
Of course there are hundreds of pros and cons for each platform, and amongst my many tasks over the coming weeks I intend to write a little bit more about this as I think it’s a topic that people will find very useful and something I have had quite a bit of experience with over the past couple of years.
In the meantime I want to let you all know I am installing a WordPress plugin that makes my comments “dofollow“. Wordpress by default ads a “nofollow” tag which means Google, and the other major search engines, ignore the link back to the commentators website.
I’m removing this because I have decided I do not agree with the principal behind the nofollow tag – I believe if you take the time to comment you deserve a credit to your site. I also have a zero tolerance for spam and will not accept comments if they are spammy or off topic. And finally, I want to encourage people to interact with me and others here.
So go ahead and leave me a comment, what are you waiting for!
