I built this website last July and over the last 13 months have found the software easy to manage, and I think it’s reasonably easy for people to leave comments in my posts. One of the extremely clever features is that the first time someone posts a comment, I have to vet it and approve the contributor; once I have approved them that first time, any subsequent posts from them just show up automatically in the feed.
The only challenge with this is when someone whose name I don’t know posts a comment. Is this the name of someone I’ve been chatting with and mentioned my blog to? I don’t always know the last names of people I’m talking to, here, or when travelling, so that nice lady Jennifer I met on the beach three weeks ago could have an email name like jenjolly, for all I know.
I’ve only had a couple of comments come in from people whose email address I didn’t recognize, and as they were pleasant, positive, normal-sounding remarks, I’ve approved them and replied. That may have been a mistake; one of them may not have been legit, as shortly thereafter (say, 4 to 6 weeks later), the spam arrived. Up to five, ten, even twenty posts a day. They get stopped at the gate, but I did have to go through them individually to cull them. The comments are entertaining (and obvious): things like, “your knowledge of this subject is insightful”, or, “I appreciate reading articles from experts”, or, “can you tell us more about this subject?” That last one was in reference to hot dogs in cans on UK grocery shelves. A popular and important topic on the world stage at the moment.
WordPress (my website software) is great – it only took a few minutes once a day for about three days for me to pretty much eliminate all the spam, and set up future comments to be turned away. It still comes in, but goes straight into the Trash which I empty about once a week.
The user names or comments usually include the words: porn, xxx, vip, and so on, and are immediately filtered out. So just a heads-up to those of you commenting, if you plan on referencing porn or vip’s in your comments, well, they won’t make the cut. Just sayin’.