Dealing with spam comments on your blog

Spam comment! Alarm, alarm! Shown, message in my email box. I have all comments e-mailed to me, so that I can then go and eliminate spam immediately

One of the problems keeping a blog entails is that other people will come along and deface you blog with irrelevant comments, the only "value" of which is to create a link to their own sites, and thus persuade the search engines to rank their sites more highly. Spam comments (like email spam) generally, though not always, relate to sex or drugs.

To avoid spam comments you can do various things. From most to least drastic, in terms of how easy you want to make it for genuine comments:

• Not allow comments of any kind. Assuming you are using Blogger, go to Comments >> Settings and under "Comment defaults for posts", choose no comments. No one can comment then, not even your Mum!
• Select who can comment. Go to Comments >> Settings and under "Who can comment" select "Anyone" (including all spammers); "Only registered users" (in effect, all spammers with a Blogger account -- that's what registered users means); or "Only members of this blog". You maybe want the latter if you are using it with a class of students
  
• Not make your blog a public one. With Blogger, go to Settings >> Basic and under "Add your blog to our listing", pick "no". I can't remember ever having seen a spam comment on any of my "private" blogs. Highly recommended if it's one intended only for you and your students
• Turn on "comment moderation". Which means you will be alerted to new comments, and have to approve them or otherwise
  
• Turn on the "comment notification" feature . Go to Setttings >> Comments, and add an email address at the foot of that page. New comments will then get emailed to you, with a handy link to go delete them, if necessary (see also image, top of this post)

Note that clever spammers never comment on recent posts, they always go for the ones they think you won't look back at.

Spammers please note: I remove all spam comments almost immediately from this blog and would thank you not to waste my time or your own.