Stats Referer Spam Moderation, Like Blogger Comment Moderation, Is Collaborative

Some blog owners just do not understand the realities of referer spam moderation.

How can I set my dashboard, to not track pageviews from referring sites like "vampirestat . com"?

Not everybody understands that Stats was not designed for catering to individual preferences, in deciding what statistics should be displayed.

Stats spam moderation was not designed to allow for individuals to decide on what figures to display - or ignore. Like Blogger Comment moderation, Stats is collaborative, fuzzy, and heuristic.

Collaborative systems work best when everybody is subject to the same restrictions. Blogger / Google can best fight referer spam by monitoring all activity, against all blogs, uniformly.

Stats displays show the top 10 entries, in every list.

Some referer spam, like some genuine traffic, is not displayed, simply because at least 10 other traffic sources (bogus or genuine) are displayed.

Since newer blogs, with less established real traffic, are more vulnerable to referer spam, owners of newer blogs are more likely to demand individual filtering options. Owners of more mature blogs, who have devoted more time to publishing their blogs, don't see the spam, and don't worry about filtering it.

If individual blog owners were given the choice of what "traffic sources" should be filtered, for each different blog, they would waste more time examining their Stats displays, recording what sources appear spammy, and updating their filters. This would leave them less time for maintaining and publishing their blogs.

Given this possibility, referer spammers would be encouraged to tune their attacks, and to focus their attentions upon newer blogs, to encourage the newer owners to waste more time maintaining filters. In some cases, this could even enable referer spammers to conduct DOS attacks against blog owners who are naive enough to believe that they can effectively identify and filter referer spam.

With individual blog owners given the ability to individually filter Stats displays, referer spammers would be better able to conduct DOS attacks against innocent, third party blogs and websites.

Like every other righteously needed Blogger enhancement, adding individually maintained Stats filters would make Stats more complex. This would require Blogger Engineering to spend more time developing a feature demanded by a minority of blog owners - and spend less time developing and maintaining other, more essential features.

It does not require too much imagination to suspect the legitimacy of some of the unhappy blog owners.

Why does Blogger not give me the ability to decide, for myself, what traffic sources that I want to monitor?

Some of these might even be the referer spammers, forcing Blogger Engineering to develop features that, in the long run, would benefit the spammers as much as the blog owners.

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Comment Moderation In Blogger Blogs, Using Google+ Comments

With more Blogger blogs being updated to use Google+ Comments, we're seeing a few questions in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?, about comment moderation.

How do I moderate comments, with Google+ Comments enabled on my blog?

This is a question for which there is no easy answer - and this is one of the least appreciated feature limitations of Google+ Comments.

Native Blogger commenting allowed the option to moderate comments before or after they were published.

Google+ Comments, for Blogger blogs, provides no ability to moderate before publishing. All comments must be moderated after they are published. Moderation now simply consists of the ability to declare a comment as abusive - and this ability is shared equally by all users of Google+, who are in the right Circle to read and mark any comment.

With native Blogger Commenting, you (the blog administrator / owner) could moderate comments (before or after publishing), using either email, or the dashboard Comments section. With Google+ Comments, you have no such ability - and the dashboard won't even have a Comments section, listing comments made against the blog. You can view comments made - when you are able to view them - on a post by post basis, under each post.

As the blog owner, you do not have control over all comments, published against your blog. If you allow comments using Google+, anybody who is in one of your Circles can publish a comment against your blog. If you Share a blog post to the Public - or if someone else Shares a post from your blog to the Public - and a third person comments, you may not even see the comment made, against your blog.

You cannot see comments published by people who are not in your Circles, unless the comments are posted Publicly - even if the comments are published against your blog.

For these reasons, this blog remains with Blogger Commenting.

We have a Problem Rollup discussion where we are soliciting feedback from each blog owner, who sees this new feature - Google+ Comments - to be unacceptable as designed. If you are able to provide your opinion, in the rollup discussion, please keep your remarks brief and polite - and stay on topic.

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Deleted Comments Cannot Be Recovered

Blogger blog owners, who are accustomed to recovering deleted files on a personal computer, will find Blogger Comments to lack useful protection.

If you accidentally delete a file on your personal computer, no worry - just look in the Trash Can, find the file in question, and recover the file. Just do this before you empty the Trash Can.

Comments, published on our blogs, cannot be recovered once deleted.

I deleted a comment - but now realise that I acted in haste. How do I recover the comment that I deleted?

To this person, there is no useful answer.

Whether you moderate comments before or after they are published - and whether you moderate using the dashboard Comments wizard, or your email Inbox - once you click on "Delete" (and possibly hit "Yes"), the comments in question are gone. There is no Trash Can for deleted comments.

Some blog owners will retrieve the deleted content (possibly, from email), and manually re publish the content, when possible. Unfortunately, that will produce a comment with (possibly) the deleted text - but no link to the originator of the comment deleted. If the text content of the comment is the relevant detail to you, as the blog owner, you may do this - but the republished comment won't be the same.

Delete comments with care. Once you delete a comment, you won't get it back.

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If You Moderate Comments Using Email, Mark The Spam Properly

One evidence of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, comes from blog owners who are moderating comments, to their blogs, using comment moderation email.

I am constantly assailed by spam comments, being published to my blog, delivered to my Inbox! Is there anything I can do, about the spam, except just keep deleting?

Comment moderation, using email, offers several choices for action - but only one action will have any actual effect upon the spam.

When you moderate comments using email, and you are using comment moderation email - not comment notification email, you'll have the same choices for comment moderation, as when you use the Blogger dashboard wizard.

• Publish
• Delete
• Mark as spam

You'll have an additional choice, too.

• Moderate comments for this blog.

The latter choice gives you - when you are properly logged in to Blogger - quick access to the dashboard Comments wizard, to moderate from there.

As with using the dashboard wizard, the choice here is crucial. You need to mark spam comments as Spam. If you delete, the comment goes away - and nothing is done to train the spam filters. Spam comments, deleted, will simply let the spammer continue to annoy you.

With email messages, there are two more actions which some people take - and neither will do anything, directly, about comment spam.

• Some people will delete the email message - and this simply removes the email message, and the emailed copy of the spam, from the Inbox.
• Other people will use the "Spam" email mark. This selection is used to train the email comment filters - but it will only indirectly train the comment spam filters.

Neither deleting the email message, nor marking the email message as spam, will do anything about comment spam.

If you're looking at the comment notification email message, you'll have no comment moderation choices. Here, your only choice will be to delete the email message - if you're concerned with Inbox capacity. You can't moderate, using comment notification email.

Marking an email message, containing a spam comment, as spam - whether you are viewing the comment moderation or comment notification email message - accomplishes nothing. When you mark an email message as spam, you're reporting the sender of the email message. With comment moderation or comment notification email, marking an email message as spam reports the Blogger comment forwarding wizard - and this does nothing about the originator of the spam comment.

Use email to moderate comments, if you like. It's a convenient way to quickly moderate comments - and for some, more convenient than the Blogger dashboard. But make the right choices, when moderating.

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