« When a 7.8 Isn't Top News | Main | Going Social »
Blog Comments, Spam, and Disqus
So, as most know, I was very busy at work until just about two weeks ago. What happened two weeks ago? I left where I worked. The point? Before two weeks ago I didn't have any time at all to deal with comment spam. Nor have I had time to deal with the fact that my blog needs to be upgraded to MT4, which I'm sure will help some. That doesn't help the fact that yesterday I sorted through over 22,000 comments and 99.96% were spam. As an aside, if you've done a real comment in the last 6 months and it's not posted it never will be now.
However, I don't think upgrading to MT4 will help 100% considering the motivation of the spammers. Even sorting through a few hundred isn't something I really want to do. So, I've been evaluating Disqus for the comments. Using Disqus will provide a number of benefits. However, it also comes with a couple of negatives. First, the negatives (that's just the way I am).
As a blog owner, I want control over the comments. Using Disqus, I have full control over the comments but they aren't in my database. According, the a FAQ, though, with the MovableType plugin, the contents will be rendered via the API from the server side, so I don't have to worry about search results or anything like that.
If Disqus goes away, or even just goes down, so would my comments. For my blog, that's not critical but it would be quite annoying. They've recently had such an outage and have responded to it quite well, in my opinion. Still, It's a risk.
Disqus also requires a form of login. Well, even if it doesn't require a login, I want to require a login, so this negative would apply regardless of using Disqus or not. In any case, this will raise the bar for people commenting. I've definitely gotten a reasonable share of real anonymous comments. Do I really want those? Maybe not, but they have added to the conversations. Requiring, however, is the key to spam reductions and the key to increase the value of the comments. Disqus supports many systems so I'm confident that folks will have some place they can log in to, assuming they'll trust Disqus.
The positives for me, however, outweigh the negatives.
The biggest positive, of course, is the fact that switching to Disqus should virtually eliminate comment spam. That means that I can probably turn off 100% moderation and let the comments flow in real-time. I'm suspecting this will help attract even more comments.
Next, Disqus is often adding new features. Most recently, they paired with Seesmic to provide video comments. That's pretty cool, if a bit goofy. I'm not sure how will video comments will do in the long run. They already have things like threaded comments, social sharing of comments, and many other things.
Finally, by using Disqus, I'm offloading nearly all of the load of comments (or even spam attempts) on to the Disqus servers. This should reduce the load on my own server and help it scale better (if I ever do get a popular post, for instance).
So, I'm starting to try to use Disqus on my site. Naturally, I've run in to some problems. It would appear that Disqus doesn't work on MovableType when dynamic templates are turned on. If I switch to static templates, the Disqus comment system draws correctly. If it's dynamic, that doesn't work unless there is already a Disqus comment present. So, I know it's close and most likely just a minor bug.
Still, the dynamic templates make publishing a new post much, much faster. I don't have to worry about load under comment storms (usually caused by spammers on this site) when using static templates, though. So, I'm not sure if I wait for it to be fixed or switch over to static templates until it's working and watch the load on the system. Or, perhaps, upgrading to MT4 will fix the problem.
In any case, until I figure out which direction I'm going to take, comments may or may not work at all. :)
Posted by Shane on May 18, 2008 10:56 AM | Permalink
TrackBacks
http://www.kf6nvr.net/mt/kf6nvr-tb.cgi/849
