This week SlingAlibi has been examining ways to clean up CommentSpam.

By default, BlogEngine.NET 1.5 does not have the heavy protection from comment spam. A handy Extension like Askismet works wonders (as does the impending upgrade); however, one way to disguise your site from spammers is to see how they find your site.

A quick examination of the Analytics for this site showed how the spammer culprits determine a site is vulnerable for spam. About 4% of the traffic came from a search for “powered by blogengine.net” – in exact quotes. This is simple enough to change, while still crediting our packaged application.

Editing the Master Page

You’ll need to edit the master page for the theme you are using. For our site, we keep it simple and use the Standard theme. You’ll find this inside the Theme directory.  Open up the site.master file and change the footer text to read something else – anything else…

Ah, a perfect example of comment spam, recursive and redundant in its very own nature. How to avoid it? Slingalibi has put a policy of charging $100 per comment or advertisement not related to the post content. Thanks to comment tracking, we can see the IP address and email of the offending orginator – for SlingAlibi, it appears in many variations of the alias, Dr. Britt Borden, who owes the site over $10k already!  Since we’ve only implemented the policy, we will let you pass on the old comments and spam, but going forward, we will begin to charge you, Dr. Britt.

How to get rid of comment spam with BlogEngine.NET

The quickest way to get rid of comment spam is to initiate a fee for unrelated comments. To do so, open the comment.ascx file (located in the User Controls directory) and add the following line:

Ensure that your comments are moderated (by default they will be) so that offensive comments will not find their way into your content.  From there, use the IP address and email addresses to notify the offender of your policy and begin charging.  Depending on where you are hosted, the local authorities will assist in ensuring that your policy is indeed enforced.