Importance of comments and automatic spam protection.

Importance and necessity of comments on websites, blog or forum is already understood by everyone. That is so because they directly influence the traffic. Comments for searching engines imply that the website content is actively discussed. Many users value the utility of a product by comments to it. But there is one peculiarity – this may be the wish of some users to get a backlink and traffic from your website. Nevertheless, all websites and forums are affected by spam, automatic or manual.

I offer you to speak today about the protection of a web resource from spam. Spam in comments, blogs or in a forum creates considerable workload for moderators and if you’ve got your personal resource, blog or forum, all this work falls on you, taking much time for routine tasks. No user would read forum or website overwhelmed with spam so protective measures are to be taken.

So what methods or principles of spam protection do various software products offer?

In fact all spam protection methods consist of complicating the way to the comments for spam bots. But what makes the access more complicated for spam bots, makes it more complicated for users as well, so this is the reverse of the coin. Inputing Captcha, counting numbers and answering questions is quite embarrassing for everyone. Such methods push the visitors off. And comments and messages on forums are the source of traffic. The more sophisticated the methods of protection are, the more complicated the bots become as they learn how to avoid protection.

Another aspect of the protection methods is protection from manual spamming. It consists in  pre-moderation of messages, i.e. permanent control by a moderator, which also pushes the visitors off as they wish to communicate in real time but not wait for moderation of their messages. If you do not use pre-moderation you may also choose to delete spam messages manually which is also not good.

You have to hire staff for moderation and this means extra losses.

And if it is your personal website and you are a moderator here, you waste YOUR time already. So maybe you just automate the process?

So consider another spam protection method which lacks the drawbacks of the previous ones. Here users may post messages and comments online and they are released now from captcha and another tools offered to them within conterspam methods.

Let`s consider this solution, which is CleanTalk.Spam protect plug-in, more precisely. This plug-in currently works with the following platforms: Joomla, phpBB, WordPress, DataLife Engine, IP Board, vBulletin.

Its principle of operation is based on the messages relevancy and evaluation of this relevancy to the topic of website, blog or article to which the comment is written.

If a commentary was written by user and fits the topic, it will be automatically published. If the message does not coincide with the topic, it will undergo manual moderation and the user will be sent notification with the reason for blocking. The user here will be able to correct his message while a bot will have to switch to a less protected resource.

As the result the website is protected from spam and off topic messages and visitors have handy and simple registration procedure and comments form which is undoubtedly an advantage as the comments are the source of content. Resources previously spent on moderation may now be redirected to more productive activity.

Additional features of the CleanTalk plug-in allow to block messages with stop words and form the user`s his own list of stop words. The service also allows to send the messages, which contain obscene lexis, swearing and proclivities to ethnic dissention, to manual moderation.