Ask HN: How to prevent comment spam on personal blog?

3 pointsposted 2 years ago
by rishikeshs

Item id: 41688205

8 Comments

DamonHD

2 years ago

I have essentially never[0] had open comments on any of my own[1] sites since ~1995[2] since it is too much work to prevent and always has been.

[0] For a brief interval I did try.

[1] With CAPTCHAs and other complex rules such as manually approving new users, preventing insertion of links within the first few posts, etc, and multiple attentive moderators, sites that I have helped moderate/admin have managed to keep SPAM count low.

[2] One such site page: https://www.exnet.com/springboard.html

rishikeshs

2 years ago

Yes! It’s horrible! I wish I could figure out a way. Does Recaptcha by google work?

DamonHD

2 years ago

All the hurdles together generally worked: I doubt that CAPTCHA on its own is enough these days.

solardev

2 years ago

Put it on a Cloudflare free plan or just add Disqus?

rishikeshs

2 years ago

I don’t like Disqus! It’s too bloated.

What do you mean by putting it on Cloudflare?

solardev

2 years ago

Cloudflare's web application firewall adds various kinds of bot detection and blocking. It's one layer of defense against spam, but not as good as content based blocking like Akismet.

rishikeshs

2 years ago

Interesting, mine[1] is a static site hosted on cloudflare pages. Not sure how to implement this firewall though.

[1]https://rishikeshs.com

solardev

2 years ago

It's in your dashboard, set up the security settings and such. Or check their docs or ask their support.

The WAF stuff is actually their core product, what they started with long before Pages became a thing.