It’s just a function of HaloScan’s security, I suppose. I got close to a thousand unique users yesterday, so it’s not like it’s a dead site.

http://sequenza21.com/dev/blog

It’s still blogging away. The eventual owner of this ported blog will have to change the dates if they care and re-add the images. Does this seem useful? At least the text is there. Although, the formatting seems to be lost. Mainly because I’m parsing and re-posting pure text, not HTML.

The fact that your blogs don’t get hit by spam is itself telling…

I don’t think the answer is to restrict users. The answer is to provide means to enable users to freely post without also leaving the site wide open for spammers. We both found this out when it came to the wiki—we were getting a ton of drug spam every day that you and I would have to clean up, and now it’s a rare event. We didn’t make it more onerous for people to register and post information on the wiki. Rather, we tweaked the code to block particular types of posts.

Perhaps user registration would be a good thing here as well, although I have mixed thoughts on it.

My point is that an important reason why this site has done so well is that people can comment freely and rapidly. The rapidity is critical; it gives people a reason to keep coming back, and more frequently as well.

FWIW, I’ve yet to get a single piece of spam on my blog. One or two obnoxious comments, maybe. But no spam.

So see what happens. There’s not much of anything to be lost if Jerry keeps comments unmoderated for right now. Let’s keep it in perspective—no one dies if we get spammed. Worse case scenario—we get hit and the comments go back to being moderated.

Of course, Jeff, don’t go ahead and post anonymous drug spam to prove me wrong…;-)

I\’m not sure what kinds of tools there are in WP to delete bulk comments, but once you\’ve seen a database or a page clogged with hundreds, literally hundreds of ads for porn, drugs, etc. it\’s not a pleasant experience.

But since you\’ve volunteered to help delete all this spam we\’ll shortly be seeing, I feel much better.

I think a better way to prevent spam, while perhaps not entirely foolproof, would be to use a random string generator and require the poster to provide the current string in order to post a comment. I don’t know if that is an option with the current system, but it would at least prevent bots from getting through.

I just don’t know that one can count on an army of volunteers for this. We have enough of a time getting people to post to the wiki, and wikis are entirely dependent on the community for policing. We might have a few people who are willing to moderate right now, but as time goes on, I don’t know how consistent that process would be.

And Haloscan is not at all difficult for anyone to spam to. Anyone can post to Haloscan, yet I haven’t seen more than one spam on my own blog, nor have I seen much of any spam with the previous comments system on S21.

Jeff, your point is well taken, but I think it’s worth an experiment to see how well this all works without moderation. Besides, the CD Reviews page seems not to require it, and I’m not seeing any spam as yet (although it’s still early, I suppose).

Thanks!