Laura Arjona Reina

Disabling comments in my blog

Laura Arjona Reina at

I'm getting more spam than the amount that I can stand in my blog. Comments are moderated, so the public is not suffering that, only me. From time to time I go to my dashboard and clean the spam. I'm afraid that I delete some legit comment in these spam-cleaning-fevers, or, more probably, that a legit comment waits in the queue for several days, just because I'm lazy to deal with spam and let days pass by (until the fever comes).

I think I'm going to follow the wisdom of @Bradley M. Kuhn and link to a pump.io note for comments on my blog posts (disabling them in Wordpress.com). I usually post a notice when I write something in my blog, so the only task is to update the blog post with the pump.io URL of the thread for comments.

While Wordpress.com allows to write comments quickly, without need of an account (you write just a name and an email, and the comment), in pump you need to have an account and sign in to comment. That looks as a bad thing, a barrier for people to participate. But of course, it stops spam :)

After thinking about it a bit, it's a federated service, they can choose the pump server that they want, they can create a fake account, they don't need to provide personal information... and it's another way to promote one of the social networks where I live. Other systems link to facebook, twitter, or other places, and those ones they don't have any of the advantages of being here in this federated free-software powered social network :)

If anybody don't want to use pump.io but wants to comment, other ways to reach me or the related blog post are:

  • Comment in the GNUSocial fediverse: the post announcing the thread for each blog post will be propagated to my quitter.se account too.

  • While I'm still using Twitter, they can comment on the corresponding tweet, but beware that I'm seriously thinking about closing my account there, since I rarely use it and don't like the platform.

  • Drop me an email, I can post the comment on behalf of that person (if you want your comment to be "anonymous", please state it in the email).

So now it's decided, and this is the first post of this new experiment. This text is posted in my blog too, and you can comment here :)

a(n) person, julian correa, Jonas (kabniel), Douglas Perkins and 2 others likes this.

Stephen Michael Kellat shared this.

Show all 11 replies
I am a paleotech dude, I wanted to thank you for allowing email comments. Leaving the door open for us who don't feel comfortable enough on Social Networks is greatly appreciated.

grty at 2014-09-13T17:52:40Z

Nice!

Your iniciative is 5 month late ;-) In April, I decided pump.io to be my blog's comment system.

At this time, there was some blabla to @Evan Prodromou, about a seeded project to make a comment system based on pump.io.

Manolo P. at 2014-09-13T17:54:05Z

X11R5 likes this.

I would say you keep it open, elsewhere is too much of a pain most wouldn't undertake. Also wordpress.com has akismet what sort of spam you are dealing with, I am sure you are facing some "advanced" level spam because akismet filters are pretty good.
@sazius wordpress.com doesn't allow custom code, it's a big multi-user wordpress installation (mu) each blog shares same code and for safety purposes they don't let any code.


testbeta at 2014-09-13T18:49:04Z

I just don't bother with allowing comments as it is a static site using BlazeBlogger for my site. Content gets posted too rarely there anyhow.

Stephen Michael Kellat at 2014-09-13T20:32:01Z