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LawPundit Now Open to (Sensible) Comments: Blogger Integrates Google Spam Filtering Technologies in its Comment System

By Andis Kaulins

Blogger has integrated Google spam filtering technologies in its "Comment System": see Blogger Buzz: New Comments System on Blogger. In addition, unwanted comments can now either be deleted in full or their content removed.

Previously, if a blogger at Blogger opened up his comments to the world, it was not possible to delete illegal, potentially illegal or offensive comments or spam. A blogger had only the remedy of deleting the entire posting -- including comments -- and then reposting the original posting without comments, a tedious process.

The other alternatives were to reduce commenters to those who had Google accounts, to moderate all comments one by one and to reduce comment spam via a Captcha control. In recent months, the latter Captcha control was not keeping out masses of Chinese language comments and commenters that somehow were evading the Blogger Captcha control. (We have visions of thousands of Chinese sitting in giant computer halls and spamming the world.)

Hence, we at LawPundit had stopped the comment function entirely for any reader who was not a member of the blog, i.e. except for us, that meant everyone else was excluded from commenting -- not really a desirable solution, as the ability to comment is something that some readers wish to have, even if they do not make much use of it. It is still a certain exercise of freedom, which is important.

Thus, we are hopeful that the new comment system works and we are going to try it here and there to see IF it works as we would wish.

Full post as published by LawPundit on August 13, 2010 (boomark / email).