14 DAY TRIAL // Fighting spam is a constant struggle for Blogger. As one of the biggest blog hosts in the world, it has to deal with huge amounts of spam messages every day. But, until now, bloggers have had to either enable comment moderation or use CAPTCHA. Thankfully, all comments on Blogger will now have to go through Google’s filtering system.
“Commenting is one of the most integral parts of blogging: it’s what makes blogging a conversation, not a monologue. That’s why we are pleased to announce two cool new improvements to Blogger’s comments system: much better spam filtering and the ability to view all comments on your blog in one place,” Saurav Shah and Junho Ryu, Software Engineers at Google wrote.
The big announcement is that Blogger is finally getting a comments manager. Under the Comments tab, which is still being rolled out so you may not be able to see it yet, all of the comments on your blog will be listed.
The comments are split into three categories, Published, Awaiting Moderation and Spam. You can see any comment made on your blog and delete it or remove it from the same page. You can also mark it as spam which will delete it immediately.
Equally important is the fact that Blogger now leverages Google’s spam filtering technologies, used in Gmail for example, for comments. Any suspicious comment will be moved to the Spam tab and will not be displayed on your blog. From the Comments section you’ll be able to remove the spam comments or mark them as Not Spam if that is the case.
This should enable users to have a completely open commenting system, no moderation or CAPTCHA check, without fear of their blog getting overrun with ‘enlargement’ links. It is somewhat surprising that it took Blogger all this time to introduce the feature, Google has some of the best spam filtering technologies around and has been using them for years in Gmail.