The Real Blogger Status

If you publish a blog, and want your readers to comment, you need to decide whether to moderate comments . Comment moderation, applied properly, help you to keep abusive and spam comments off your blog. If you want to publish a blog, and have real people commenting, you need to keep spam comments off the blog. People won't comment, if they have to compete with spam. If you want to publish a blog, and allow Blogger Hosted comments, you really should moderate . If you don't moderate, prepare to remove spam comments after they are published . Remember that Google+ Hosted comments are moderated by the community .

Some blog owners see encoded special characters, in Blogger dashboard displays - and do not understand why they are there. I recently noticed that the comments, that I view in my Blogger dashboard page, have like a series of numbers and symbols in some of the comments. This owner is looking at comments, displayed in the Dashboard Comments pages ("Published", "Awaiting moderation", and "Spam"), which right now may contain strange character sequences. The " HTML entity codes " for special characters, like ampersand, apostrophe, and quote marks, are HTML code - that will probably be with us, forever. Blogger blog content (like many other blogs and websites) uses HTML - and those characters have syntactical importance. Using them in blog content, unencoded, causes problems with browser operation.

This week, we're seeing complaints from quite a few angry blog owners, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Why do I have to solve a CAPTCHA, to comment on my own blog? and Everybody sees a CAPTCHA - even if they are logged in to Blogger! Previously, the CAPTCHA was visible only to those not logged in to Blogger, or to those wishing to comment, anonymously.

Some time ago, Blogger comment notification was changed to send notification of all comments published to a given blog. Notification now includes comments moderated as spam - either by the blog administrators, or by the Blogger spam moderation process. This confuses some blog owners, who complain about getting notifications which include spam comments. Some blog owners do not appreciate getting spam comments, in their notification email. Unfortunately, as opposed to the possibility of seeing comments appear to vanish - when comments, supposedly published, are wrongfully moderated as spam and never generate notification email - it is impossible to not include some spam comments in the notification email.

As Google+ Comments become more widely accepted in Blogger blogs, we see some confusion in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken about comment moderation options, and missing dashboard features. Besides the frequently seen confusion about ownership and visibility, of comments published under Google+ Comments, some blog owners become concerned when they cannot find the expected dashboard settings and utilities. Google+ Comments use community based moderation - and don't need dashboard, or email, based moderation by the blog administrators. The Blogger dashboard is a bit simpler, with Google+ Comments in use.

Some blog owners just do not understand the realities of referer spam moderation. How can I set my dashboard, to not track pageviews from referring sites like "vampirestat . com"? Not everybody understands that Stats was not designed for catering to individual preferences, in deciding what statistics should be displayed. Stats spam moderation was not designed to allow for individuals to decide on what figures to display - or ignore. Like Blogger Comment moderation , Stats is collaborative, fuzzy, and heuristic. Collaborative systems work best when everybody is subject to the same restrictions. Blogger / Google can best fight referer spam by monitoring all activity, against all blogs, uniformly.

With more Blogger blogs being updated to use Google+ Comments , we're seeing a few questions in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , about comment moderation. How do I moderate comments, with Google+ Comments enabled on my blog? This is a question for which there is no easy answer - and this is one of the least appreciated feature limitations of Google+ Comments .

Blogger blog owners, who are accustomed to recovering deleted files on a personal computer, will find Blogger Comments to lack useful protection. If you accidentally delete a file on your personal computer, no worry - just look in the Trash Can, find the file in question, and recover the file. Just do this before you empty the Trash Can. Comments, published on our blogs, cannot be recovered once deleted. I deleted a comment - but now realise that I acted in haste. How do I recover the comment that I deleted? To this person, there is no useful answer.

One evidence of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , comes from blog owners who are moderating comments, to their blogs, using comment moderation email. I am constantly assailed by spam comments, being published to my blog, delivered to my Inbox! Is there anything I can do, about the spam, except just keep deleting? Comment moderation, using email, offers several choices for action - but only one action will have any actual effect upon the spam.

We've had the new comment moderation system for since 2010 . Some people are just a bit confused by the filter training process . We see signs of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . I've been deleting the spam, but it keeps coming. How do I get the spam filtered? You get the spam filtered by persistently moderating, and training, the spam filters. That's the short answer.

In mid 20th century USA culture, one popular magazine had a mascot, Alfred E. Neuman , who was best known for the intellectually incurious What, me worry? As the comment spam filters are being trained , by blog owners such as you or me "voting" each individual comment as spam or not spam, we are starting to see modern day Alfreds asking in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken What, me spam? or given slightly longer and more descriptive quotes Why are my comments treated as spam by Blogger? Harsh though this may be, your comments are treated as spam, by Blogger, because either Many blog owners have "voted" your comments, posted to their blogs, to be spam. Many blog owners have "voted" similar comments, posted by spammers, to their blogs, to be spam. The bottom line here is that your style of comments just are not welcome, on these blogs. You have 3 possible courses of action. Continue to post these comments to these blogs. Post these comments to o...

The new comment filtering system has been in place now for almost 6 months , and we are slowly starting to see improvements, with signs that spam (aka "bulk") content is becoming more individualised . Recently, we've seen suggestions, from discussions in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , that the filters are being put in place in Asia. Reports of unfair filtering, similar to the complaints seen 6 months ago about English language filtering, are being seen now about Chinese, Japanese, and Thai language filtering.

The neverending process of training the comment spam filters, continues. Every month, we see reports from unhappy blog owners, who claim that the filters are not stopping the spam - and they are still having to moderate it. But, if we look at the reports more closely, we see good news. The good news, here, is two fold: Every month, we see progressively less reports of spam. We occasionally see evidence that the spam, that does get through the filters, is becoming more unique to each blog. With progressively less spam being reported, we see that the spammers are becoming less successful overall, in getting spam through the filters. With more personalised spam being reported, we see that the spammers are having to work harder, to get any spam even moderated. And hopefully, any spam that does get into the "Awaiting Moderation" queue is being quickly dispatched to the "Spam" queue , to be fed back into the filters and provide more training. The filters will ...

Now that comment filtering is in full force, some blog owners are finding that it requires an unfair amount of their time, to maintain. My blog gets a lot of comments - and too many non spam comments go into the Spam queue, forcing me to moderate before they can be published. This is an unfair waste of my time. I would like to turn the filters off, for my blog. Unfortunately for these owners, Blogger has stated that the comment filters are designed so everybody must participate . If the new filters were made optional, spammers could publish blogs with spam comments, and degrade the filter effectiveness.

Some blog owners see commenting as a community building tool, as important as Following, or maybe Stats. They see various forums, and other blogging platforms, and wonder why Blogger doesn't provide formatted, quoted, and threaded commenting, like Google Forums, or maybe WordPress. There, to reply you hit a button "Reply", compose your reply, and "Publish". Blogger doesn't track individual comments. You have to publish a comment for a given post - and there's no threading, to indicate the comment to which you're replying. When you moderate comments , and you see one that deserves a reply, you Publish the comment in question. Find the comment in question, in the "Published" folder. Click on the post title presented with the published comment. Click on "Post a Comment". Post your reply to the comment, as a comment. This is a complex procedure - though before the new comment moderation system, it was even more complex. I...

Occasionally we see observations in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , from slightly confused blog owners, about comment moderation. I keep having to mark comments from this one user, over and over, as spam. The filters just don't learn this one user. The purpose of the spam moderation filters is to identify and to filter spam comments that are posted to hundreds of blogs , simultaneously, by automated processes. Comments from individuals, that we disagree with, are simply comments that we disagree with. If the filters were designed to designate comments from individuals as spam, you'd start to see less comments in general, from people who feared that their comments could be marked as spam by blog owners who disagreed with them. The filters were designed to prevent blog owners from using the spam designation this way. The filters take "votes" from hundreds of blog owners, identifying comments posted to hundreds of different blogs. Those comments are de...

For years, we've been seeing numerous complaints in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken about unrighteous spam classification of blogs. My blog is not spam! How could anybody think that my blog is spam??

The new Blogger commenting system has been in place, in many of our blogs, for almost 3 months . Many bloggers have started to notice a marked decrease in spam, hitting our Published, and Awaiting Moderation, queues. The spammers, who attempt to abuse our blogs, are seeing the effects of the new filters, also. They will have to increase their spamming activity, to keep a steady level of income. This will require constantly increased levels of spamming activity . Besides posting more spam to our blogs, spammers will spend time posting in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken and similar forums, and causing confusion there. As spammer activity is increasingly attenuated, we'll see more complaints. Don't expect them to openly complain I can't publish my comments, because they are being filtered! as people will recognise complaints like that, and know who is publishing them. Expect more devious complaints The new spam filters don't work! Blogger needs to trash...

Occasionally, we will see an ominous problem report in BHF: Something Is Broken Somebody is posting articles in my blog, but it's not me! When we see this, the first thing that comes to mind is unwanted comments, generally when comments are not actively moderated. That's not always the case , though.

The new Blogger commenting system has been out for several weeks now , and as some blog owners are becoming accustomed to it, it appears that others are occasionally confused. We see recent reports in BHF: Something Is Broken I am moderating comments, yet I find some comments being published without my input. and I deleted the comments, and now I can't get them back! and All of the comments to my blog are going straight to Spam. These reports may be from folks who are not observing what queue they are looking at, or what the buttons do, in the Comments wizard.