A new post came up in my WP dashboard from Stuff What People Like. I've never been a fan of the blog, but do tend to look at it from time to time, just to be aware of what's going on.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpres...ws-april-16th/

Look at the comments. You don't have to scroll very far to see blatant spam, and lots of it. This blog is just the URL I have off hand - my question applies more generally.

If a blog is otherwise "good" (in the eyes of the reader), do spam comments take away from its goodness?

Most definitely in my opinion. A site with too much spam whatsoever would lead me to question the quality of the site and the webmasters maintenance. It's just plain unattractive to new visitors. If the site is "good" then most of the loyal readers you had before (if there were any) would remain loyal and wouldn't let spam comments get in the way of quality content. But it's hard to say the same for new visitors, who are there for the very first time. On top of all of this any kind of spam whatsoever is bad in a search engine eyes. I suggest removing all spam comments, and get word verification on your comment box if you don't already have it. For people who use WordPress, here's they're plug-in for comment spam stopper if you don't already have it
http://www.wp-plugins-db.org/plugin/...-spam-stopper/

Hope This Was Of Some Use To You.

Luis Gross Author And Publisher of <link removed by moderator>

Theres nothing worse than reading a blog, thats riddled with spam, puts me off reading the blog, even if the content seems ok, so it defo hurts a blog in my opinion !

Woc

I figure if they don't care enough to fight the spam on their own blogs then they don't care if I read them or not and remove them from my follow list..

why they dont use Akismet.. its a word press addon that fight spam

whats Akismet? Do you have resources to share about it?

Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that does a decent enough job at stopping spam from hitting your pages.. It comes with WordPress but needs to be activated in the plugins area and then enter an API code.. It explains where to get it..

http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet

Spam Karma was recently dropped from development so unless someone picks up that project it's going to die off..

Spam decreases the quality and also readership of the blog.
People would also be sad of the blog admin who does not care of moderating the comments.

spam just makes it messy...especially since there are so many automated spam removers out there. The owner is just lazy and allows it. Makes him look sloppy, ad his blog too.

It makes your blog looks bad because most of the comment spams content are just advertising for eg viagra and the sorts, allowing them actually decrease the value of your blog and made it as though it is not well maintained.

I use the option in wordpress on all my blogs to manually approve all comments. It takes time, but it prevents a bunch of spam.

John if it's just one or two comments I don't think it's a big deal. I know the occasional spam comment is easy to miss and there are times a spam comment looks legit on first glance.

But yeah if there's a lot it goes into my thinking about the blog. It's not my only thinking, but it's in there. If the info in the blog is that good I'd still read. I would just ignore the comments. Still a lot of spam says the blogger doesn't really care about his or her readers.

I'd also be a little more forgiving if the blog is one that gets a ton of comments since it could be easier to slip in the spam comments. The post you pointed to has over 1,000 comments. That's a lot to police.

I think it also depends on your definition of spam. I didn't look at all the comments on the post, but I scrolled down a bit and most of the comments I saw didn't necessarily strike me as spam. They may not have been the most intelligent comments, but that doesn't make them spam.

You also have to take into consideration who the community is for that particular blog. You and I might not think the comments are worthwhile, but the community there might like them.

Originally Posted by vangogh

You also have to take into consideration who the community is for that particular blog. You and I might not think the comments are worthwhile, but the community there might like them.

Very good point. Recently I visited a blog with valuable content. However the comments were really poor of intelligence and the blog was about football. So the visitors were excused.

I think there's a tendency for people to think just because they don't find something valuable that no one else can either and therefore it must be spam.

There are plenty of things in this world I have no use for, but that doesn't make any of them bad. Those things simply aren't for me. There are also plenty of things that to me are extremely valuable, yet I doubt others would care about them in the least.

Originally Posted by Feydakin

Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that does a decent enough job at stopping spam from hitting your pages.. It comes with WordPress but needs to be activated in the plugins area and then enter an API code.. It explains where to get it..

http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet

Spam Karma was recently dropped from development so unless someone picks up that project it's going to die off..

Thanks for this plug-in feydaken. This really helps in stopping spam.

if the blog have oo many spam comments, then that simply implies about the webmaster lazy enough to maintain such blog, the good thing is to help owner ease up the job there are anti spam plugin like akismet, spam karma, defensio and others

Originally Posted by vangogh

I think there's a tendency for people to think just because they don't find something valuable that no one else can either and therefore it must be spam.

I think that's probably an appropriate way to look at it, if you take the target audience into account? I'm looking at the blog post John linked to, scrolling down a little bit, and see:

Do It Baby… http://???.blogspot.com/

http://???.wordpress.com/ “art” with bananas!

Great reviews on this one: http://www.???.blogspot.com

I don't see how this stuff could be anything but spam? The third - I got tired of scrolling pretty quickly - might be legitimate and useful on a post about some new product ... maybe it's not so much about value as it is that people don't go to a joke site to be pulled off to a review site.

And to answer John's question, it looks tacky. But with so many comments, the guy deserves a bit of leeway.