The unfortunate reality of having a public blog is having to deal with comment spam. There are many people out here that don't seem to translate the same respect for property in the real world over to the Internet. It may simply be because of the anonymity that the internet affords us, or maybe they simply don't have respect in the real world to begin with. Either way, once your blog is up for a couple of months, you will start to be inundated with comment spam.
Some of this spam will come from automated bots attempting to advertise their wares on your site, but those are easily dealt with. BlogEngine.NET has built-in automated bot handling capabilities that so far has left me spam-bot free.
But the most insidious spam will come from what appears to be a fairly new movement of people that engage in so called SEO competitions. The most annoying of late being the Busby SEO Test crowd. This is from some dodgy SEO company encouraging normal internet users to spam on their behalf in the guise of a competition. You can read more about this at Keyvan Nayyeri's blog.
Unfortunately for us, these spam comments are created by humans and cannot be blocked with the usual counter-bot routines, something more dynamic is required. Luckily for us, there are companies out there actively fighting this kind of spam. One of them is Waegis, a counter-spam community that collects spam from all over the web and builds black lists based on the feedback from thousands of blog and forum owners.
Protect Yourself
Protecting your BlogEngine.NET site using the Waegis filtering power has become so much easier now thanks to rtur, one of our fellow BlogEngine.NET developers. He's put together a BlogEngine.NET extension called Commentor that automatically checks any comments created on your blog against the Waegis database. Comments from known spammers are automatically rejected, but the extension does allow you to review them manually if you so wish.
Head off to rtur's blog to get your own automatic community powered spam assassin!