Ending Anonymous Comment Spam

At one point, not so long ago, I had comments turned off on this blog. Friends asked me to turn them on. Here we are, a few years later, and I'm thinking to turn them off again. Or, just shut down all the Anonymous comments at least. However, if I take off Anonymous then people who don't have a blog at Google/ Blogger have to make an account in order to comment with their website being listed with their name. Unless Google/ Blogger has changed that since I last looked.

Anyway, I am tired of the time wasted on moderating comments versus any real people who leave a note. They have bots to spam my comments, I just have myself to moderate all the craptastic mess. So I am going for the middle road and just shutting off the Anonymous comments. If you don't like it, thank the comment spammers.

My Comment is Inappropriate???

I do not like comment moderation, especially the automatic kind. I have had to resort to using it on my WordPress blog because WordPress is a target in itself. Here I get almost zero comment spam. On Word Grrls I get about a hundred a day. It's bonkers. Still, I moderate and watch for anything missed by the bot. I do not use word or other verification or CAPTCHA's.

Tonight I tried to leave a comment on another site, Never Say Diet. I came to the site from a post on Twitter. I read the blog post and clicked in to leave a comment. I gave my name, email address and website. Then I did the math question to verify my comment and then I was given this lovely note:

Your posting was blocked by our spam filter.

Your posting on Never Say Diet from xxx.xx.xx.xx has been automatically flagged by our spam filters as being inappropriate for this website.

At Never Say Diet we work very hard behind the scenes to keep our web pages free of spam. Unfortunately, sometimes we accidentally block legitimate content. If you are attempting to post legitimate content to this website, you can help us to improve our spam filters by emailing the following information to a site administrator:

So my comment is inappropriate? In what way would that be?

Maybe the sales woman was shorter and didn't understand the idea of taller women needing larger sizes. If she only looked at you for fit versus flab she could have goofed up. I like Skinny Large. It's like me when I order a large latte with skim milk.

Ooooh Yeah. Just highly toxic, nearly pornographic in nature! Remove the children from the room!

I sent the automated reply note to the admin, it asked me to justify myself.  To prove that I'm not a spammer. I chose not to.

What is really annoying is that they may be passing my IP address to spam watch lists now. That really does piss me off. I've never left a spam comment and now I am being painted with that brush for some pissy site who can't be bothered to moderate their own comments.

If a site doesn't want comments they should just say so upfront, or turn them off.Why piss off readers, especially the readers who choose to leave comments.