CMS Made Simple Forums

I just read an interesting post that runs across several german weblogs. It is about protecting websites from comment-spam. Following all of the comments and taking a closer look at the websites that do not suffer any spam problem I came to a simple conclusion: There are only two simple things that need to be done to (finally) protect webmasters and servers from comment-spam:

1.) Submitting comments ONLY AFTER preview
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A user should review the post first (even better so there will be not mistakes and furthermore with MarkDown or Textile there could be some formatting) and then be able to submit it. Actually Textpattern does this and one of my blogs is TXP based - I never had spam and I do not use any plugin there (like CAPTCHA).

2.) Adding a checkbox
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There is one cool thing that I have seen on some weblogs: A checkbox saying someting like "This is no advertisement." ... you could even use this to sue certain spammers or single users if you would like to. And furthermore it is more difficult for bots to get around these checkboxes.

Maybe there are other interesting approaches (like trash-fields, i.e. empty fields that are hidden from users) that might be of use as well. I would like to see something like this in CMSMS though I know it is not a blog but since I am so fond of it I would almost certainly use it for blogging. And by the way: It is as simple as any blogging software I know!

Regards,
Nils

As far as sueing certain users, the main thing is to know who this is, and then you can just ban their IP - it's easier.  As far as other things you have suggested, these are nice things to have, but at this point the most important thing is to have comments work for individual news posts.

or you could wrap the comments stuff in customcontent tags and make everybody be a registered user anyways.

katon wrote: As far as sueing certain users, the main thing is to know who this is, and then you can just ban their IP - it's easier. 

But only as long as you are a savvy webmaster who knows how to do this. CMS are most often used by users who do not even know what spam is.

katon wrote: As far as other things you have suggested, these are nice things to have, but at this point the most important thing is to have comments work for individual news posts.

Yes, you are absolutely right. That is why I posted it as a feature request.

Regards,
Nils