I just noticed that I recently had a few spam messages on this blog– something about Texas Hold ’em Poker. It was only a four or five posts fortunately, and Haloscan makes it relatively easy to clear the junk out, but it does worry me. As I’ve noted here before, the main reason why I moved away from MT and to Blogger is I was spending 30 or 40 minutes a day clearing away spam, even with MT-Blacklist. I don’t know how other options handle (or not) spam, but I do know that the Blogger/Haloscan combination have done a great job of blocking unwanted messages.
Well, until now. It’s just a couple of messages at this point, but I’m worried about what might be coming….
I have several options, of course. I could just suck it up and delete the spam messages that get through– and that’s probably what I’ll do for a while, at least. I could go back to the Blogger comment scheme, which I find kind of clumsy but which works. I could go to a system (Blogger has this, but I could use some other content management system like Drupal or something) which requires users to log in, which I suppose would pretty much eliminate spam.
Or I could just turn comments off entirely.
I know that Jenny did this a while back, but just briefly. She decided that the comments were too much a part of the whole “blogging thing” for her. For me, I’m not so sure. I don’t get that many comments, for one thing.
For another, comments aren’t that much a part of the blogging experience for me. Don’t get me wrong– I like comments. It’s always nice to know someone is reading this stuff, and I do get info and such from comments. But I mainly keep this blog as a sort of notebook/reading journal of stuff I come across online, stuff that has to do with my academic work (mostly) and stuff I want to get back to later. I could still do that with no comments allowed.
Well, I probably won’t do anything in the near future. I’ve been contemplating some larger scale web remodeling around here anyway, and maybe I’ll contemplate a new blog scheme then. Unless I start hearing a lot more about poker, sex aids, cheap meds, etc.