comments

Spam comments versus real comments. With this website being about five years old, I have received my fair share of comments. I do not currently have a contact widget set up for this website but that does not stop the spam comments. Below is a screenshot of comments I typically receive for this site. It appears that two of my blog posts receive the most comments whether real or spam. Many spam comments look like real, individual comments which is a bit confusing. Other comments are completely unrelated to any of the content on the blog post or the website as a whole. I seem to get many spam comments regarding soccer and how to improve soccer skills. As of yet, I haven’t set up any spam comment plugins. I receive emails multiple times per day when a new comment is posted on the site. If I see that it is from one of the main two posts that seem to get the bulk of comments and which are several years old, I know it is most likely a spam comment. What is also difficult is that I want to make sure I engage with visitors of the site. Some comments will ask for help with blogging, some comments will ask about SEO and say that they saw my post on Yahoo. I’m not even sure if Yahoo is a thing anymore. Didn’t that go the same place that AOL went? By now I am pretty well versed at spotting spam comments. The same comments seem to pop-up multiple times per week. One would think that something about accidentally landing on the page would be a sincere comment but it is one of the most common. As you can see from the screenshot below, I get to see the email address or URL that the comment came from originally. Many URLs point to spam websites and spam email accounts. In an attempt to try and keep this website up and shaping it more towards the original goals of advocacy, art, and vision; I continue to make time to read comments before I delete them. It also appears that once you mark an author as a spam comment, the same comments from the same author are not automatically marked as spam. Also, with the Themify Builder I have on the backend of this site, the Wordpress mobile app does not work at all for me to try and use my phone as a way to quickly respond to comments or post a new blog post. I like the ability to edit my website with the Parallax Themify Builder but I could use some mobile abilities in keeping this blog more current, rather than waiting to sit down and type on my laptop.