Should We Shame Spammers & The Companies That Use Them

If you are among the not quite 987,283 readers that frequent this blog you may have noticed that I have written about comments and commenting systems on more than one occasion.

It is not because the best way to get comments is to blog about Triberr but because comments are how you build community. If you do a good job of it someone might decide to write a song and include you in it.

Community is important to me. Community has led to both freelance and full time work as well as built real friendships and that is part of why I have tested different commenting systems and why I ended up reactivating CommentLuv.

The CommentLuv Conundrum

CommentLuv is one of the most effective tools I have used to build a readership and generate community but it comes with a price and that is more spam.

Every time I have ever used it I have seen my spam jump dramatically and it is the reason why I deactivated CommentLuv a while back.

Andy Bailey the creator of CommentLuv has done what he could to help combat spam and we reached a point where I have to say it hasn’t been quite the issue of the past.

And maybe his changes are why some of the spammers are not using automated systems to comment. They are clearly sitting at the computer and writing comments that are mostly legit so that they get past the various spam guards here.

What Can We Do?

There are a bunch of options:

1. Broadcast the names and IP addresses and try to shame the spammers.
2. Shame the companies whose names keep showing up in links and hope that forces them to take action.
3. Hope our spam filters work and delete the ones that get through.
4. Deny their IP address.

I am tempted to try to use shame but the spammers typically don’t use their real names and if I can’t prove that company XYZ hired them what am I doing.

Even if I can prove it, are there any real benefits to trying to shame them?

Probably not.

Can’t burn their homes or spam offices down and even if I could I wouldn’t. They may be idiots but I am not willing to hurt them or go to jail for their idiocy.

Hell it is bad enough that I have to spell out that my comment was figurative,  but with the litigious nature of some people I’d prefer to protect myself.

So I’ll continue to delete them when they get through and potentially deny their IP address but most importantly I won’t let them prevent me from doing what needs to be done here.

What about you? Do you have any special tricks/tools for dealing with spam?