Blogger finally gets Spam Filter for Comments

Being one of the biggest blog hosting platform, Blogger has to deal with enormous amounts of spam comments every day. Until now, the only option available for Blogger users to catch spam is to either enable comment moderation or use CAPTCHA. But this hinders real time discussion as each comments has to be screened and allowed or denied manually.

To address this issue, Google has introduced an automatic spam filtering system that will block spam comments without Bloggers having to enable comment moderation.

Google is essentially introducing a comment manager to Blogger. This is available under the Comments tab on your Blogger dashboard. You might not see it yet as it’s being rolled out in stages. All comments received in your blog posts will be available under this tab, at one place. This is a big improvement over the current approach where Bloggers had to set up email alerts to monitor comments on a blog.

The comments are split into three categories - Published, Awaiting Moderation and Spam. Under the Published section, you can see all comments made on your blog and delete or mark as span from the same page. When you mark a comment as Spam, it will be deleted immediately from your blog.

Any suspicious comments detected by Google’s spam filters will be sent to the Spam inbox. These comments are not visible to your readers, but will be left there for your review. Here, you can permanently delete the spam messages or choose to publish them incase the system incorrectly classified legitimate messages as spam.

The new spam filter should enable users to have a completely open commenting system, without moderation or CAPTCHA and still keep it free from spammers.