Comments on: Metablog: A comment on “Still no comments.”

By: walt

walt — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:24:31 +0000

I go back and forth, and I suspect that spambots work in waves. 100 one day, 6 the next, 10 the next, 60 the next…and one did get through yesterday (but it was arguably not spam, just irrelevant).

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 01:51:05 +0000

Although I’m reluctant to mention it, I’m still seeing a marked decrease in the amount of spam hitting DLTJ. (Spammers, if you want to know what ‘DLTJ’ is you can start spamming it, I’m not going to provide a link for you — you have to look it up yourself.) In the 96-hour period ending today I’ve seen just 47 messages caught by Akismet (and none getting through). That seems like about half the normal amount.

By: walt

walt — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:11:27 +0000

Peter, I think the surge was a one-off: It’s back to 20 or so a day. Spam Karma 2 seems to work well; I’ve had only one spamment get through (briefly), and certainly fewer than a dozen legit comments trapped as spam.

You’re in the same boat I am: For our blogs, comments are beneficial and workable. But that isn’t true for all blogs. If I was counseling someone setting up a new blog (which I’ve done, once or twice), I’d suggest that they start out with comments enabled–but certainly not without some combination of an effective tool like Akismet or Spam Karma, moderation, or a Capcha tool.

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 01:20:36 +0000

With some irony, Walt, I came to WaR to comment on how I've noticed a decrease in blog spam in the last 72 hours — only about three dozen compared to the hundreds I usually get. Hits have remained constant (reaching a new plateau after the Library Service Oriented Architecture series got started). I'm using Akismet and have been extremely happy with the small number of false negatives and even smaller number of false positives — literally less than a dozen each in the 9 months I've been running it. To be honest, I hadn't considered running DLTJ with comments off. For me, it is a combination of 1) Akismet doing a very good job; 2) not getting an extraordinary number of comments; and 3) knowing that, for all of the few extra minutes it takes a day to deal with the spam queue, I may have missed out on a very engaging conversation with a repository software developer in Spain that occurred on DLTJ last week.

By: walt

walt — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:24:30 +0000

Steven, I could see that given the current focus of the blog.

As to the second note…well, consider the low comment rate on most liblogs when I’ve done studies. Other than new jobs, marriage, childbirth, or similar events, it’s really hard to know when a post will draw comments–unless, I suppose, posts are designed to troll for comments.

By: Steven M. Cohen

Steven M. Cohen — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 22:23:37 +0000

I’m considering taking comments down on LS. I’m changing the types of stuff I post and, to be honest, the number of comments have dimished greatly over the past few months.

If a blog has comments enabled and nobody comments…..

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 15:34:11 +0000

The surprising thing about CavLec in hindsight is that so little of it has come back to haunt me.

Bloggers do what works for them. I’m cool with that, as long as nobody gets hurt.