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Last week Disqus announced that they’d added improved spam filtering and reporting features.

A lot of people have complained about Disqus not being good enough at spam filtering, so it was a welcome change.  I think a lot of people responded to the announcement by returning to using Disqus, because almost immediately I started getting more referral traffic from there.

Unfortunately (and ironically) the amount of spam I got also increased.  The spam seems to be written by actual humans rather than the mangled kind of automated garbage that shows up in my email inbox.

As far as I can tell from Google Analytics, what seems to happen is that they search for “powered by disqus” plus another keyword and then comment on each blog that shows up in the search results.  The comments are either completely generic like “thanks for the interesting post” or very slightly related to the post – I don’t think they spend a lot of time actually reading the post or crafting a comment.  The point seems to be that the spammy comments contain links to spammy websites which will improve their pagerank and could drive traffic there.

From my point of view the problem is that because the comments are written by a human it’s not immediately obvious that they’re spam, which makes it harder for Disqus and for me to detect.

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This entry was posted by Mr.Wizard on 2008-12-08 at 9:40 pm under web. Tagged , . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

  • Disqus may be able to answer that one. Many of the blogs I follow use Disqus, which was one of the factors I considered when deciding to use it.
  • It 's very good..
  • Disqus has always been my favorite commenting system. The speed of it always amazes me.Disqus is under active development.it is a listen to user feedback.
  • Disqus makes managing discussions on one or multiple websites painless. Enjoyable, even. With a powerful and intuitive admin interface
  • sound great .i will try it in my blog
  • I find it much easier to administrate.
  • what you write in this post is really good and very informative. I think it will help me in the future. Thanks for the great work.
  • CristianStar
    I have a question for you: what happens if a "spam comment" lands on your site? As long as the comment is on topic and that user generates content on your blog, maybe he is entitled to leave a link as well:)) Of course, I'm speaking about on topic comments only. Have you ever thought that the person behind the link might actually be interested in that topic? Guess not...
  • Sure, but only if the comment is worth having. Also if you look at someone's Disqus profile and they've left the exact same comment on lots of different sites, chances are it's not a real comment.
  • Guest
    Have to say I do agree. Things like this just are what they are.
  • This is anice plugin for comment writers
  • Yeah nice Plugin..
  • Yes, I like it, and I find it much easier to administrate.
    That's what is nice in disqus............. : )
  • I'm quite new to Disqus. but what you write in this post is really good and very informative. I think it will help me in the future. Thanks for the great work
  • it is quite easy to spot actually. here is an example of a spam comment. notice anything different?
  • no...
  • Sooooo, have you noticed less spam yet? If you browse the link forums, this method of gaining links is still one of the biggies...
  • No, if anything it seems to be getting worse :(
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