Some months ago, the issue of malicious and/or spam commenting on blogs was raised by Linda Fox, a regular visitor to this blog. She told me the story of Kathy Sierra, a female blogger who received some pretty nasty spam comments - so nasty in fact that she cancelled all public engagements for fear of actual, physical attack and she hasn't posted on her blog since April 6th.
At the time, I have to admit to thinking that her reaction was emotional and extreme and - if like I do, you believe in the Universal Laws - her stance was simply creating more nastiness. But then I was not standing in her shoes, and I'm not sure we can ever know for sure how we would react in a given situation until we are in it. Then just a few days later, I started to get a few spam comments of my own. Not of the same ilk, but personal, off-topic and, to my mind, slightly disturbing. Some of the comments were made using the names of other regular commenters or people to which I had referred in previous posts, but I could see from the IP address that they were not the same people at all.
So what to do about it?
Continue reading "Comment spam on blogs - how do you handle it?" »
