Blogger's Automatic Spam Detection For Comments

I hate spam comments and the idea that my readers will have to read any because they were nice enough to subscribe to the comments on any of my posts. As such, I make every effort to delete the little suckers the moment I am aware of their presence. Another thing people using the blogger platform (and others, I suspect) can do is turn on moderation for comments on posts more than x days old. Cafiend of Citizen Rider put me on to this, for which I thank him. To do this in blogger (as it looks right now, November 2010), follow this handy diagram and save your changes:

This prevents people who subscribed to comments on one of your posts from receiving email thanks to spam comments made weeks or months later. Good stuff. But what about the time period before your posts become moderated? That's where a fairly new feature in blogger, "Automatic Spam Detection for Comments" comes in. I saw it mentioned on the dashboard for my blog, but didn't give it much thought until recently, when I received this irksome bit of mail in my inbox:

Its nice Blog.affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

I bet I garnered this flattering "Its nice Blog" comment because I was foolish enough to put "Affiliate Marketing" in the post title. Oh crap, I just used those keywords again! I am less concerned about that today than yesterday. Here's why: I rushed to my blog to destroy the offending comment, only to find that it wasn't there! What? Where was it? Given the title of this post, you know what happened, but it took me a little while to clue in and check the Comments tab in blogger...

This is the first spam comment I have received since the automatic detection was introduced. It would seem that at least in this case, it worked just fine! Thank you, blogger!

Now if they could just add a "dashboard" link for when I'm signed in but viewing the blog, I'll be really happy. I keep clicking "design" just to get to the screens where I can select "dashboard"... not that I'm really complaining. I mean, it's free, for Pete's sake! What have I got to complain about?

Don't Stop Riding Your Bike! Hang on just a little longer...

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