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

3 pointsposted 9 months ago
by rishikeshs

Item id: 41688205

8 Comments

DamonHD

9 months 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

9 months ago

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

DamonHD

9 months ago

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

solardev

9 months ago

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

rishikeshs

9 months ago

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

What do you mean by putting it on Cloudflare?

solardev

9 months 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

9 months 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

9 months 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.