Community Server on my mind

Tranquilize your blog and inbox

Many of us in the Community Server Land have been talking about blog spam comments, spam rules etc the last weeks. One thing left out, at least from my own blog, is an issue that comes with these spam huntings, and that I got asked in the comments of my last post, is the fact that even if you manage to stop much of the spam, you still could get a lot e-mail notifications about those possible spam comments.

This could in worst cases be as irritating as the spam itself. Now your mailbox fills up instead. What's up with that?

First, this problem is related to the possible-spam comments that gets to your blog. You won't be bothered with e-mails about those comments that are 'auto-deleted'. By default these are the ones that receive 10 or more in spam rating from the spam rules. So one thing you can do first to reduce those comments that gets marked as 'possible-spam', is to look how they are composed. For example, look for words in them, that you know that your valid visitors would have no reason to use in their comments, and paste them into the 'Forbidden words' rule. And for example set the 'Forbidden words' rule to give 5 points for each word found. You might have to update the forbidden word list during time until you find it takes most of the unwanted spam. There might be other things to look for in the spam comments, and to match that in to all the spamrules that are now available. But I found the suggestion above to be pretty effective, together with other rules configs.

Now you will most probably don't get rid of all spam. Some comments will still be rated as 'possible-spam' and give you e-mails. But there is a 'hard to find' setting to fix this. Just go into your 'My Blog' section of Control Panel and go to the 'My Email Settings'.

In there you'll find the Do not send email notifications for comments rated as spam setting. That most probably will tranquilize you e-mail inbox again.

If you want no e-mails whatsoever in your inbox, but want to be able to handle your comments and get notified of them, why not Qgyenify your blog and install Ken Robertson's AllCommentRSS module?

Have a nice weekend all!