Hi,

I'm regularly getting spam comments one one of my comics. People trying to sell fr33 vi4gr4, that kind of stuff. This is annoying... Would there be a possibility of integrating some sort of spam-filter to the comments so that spam-comments are blocked?

A blocked comment would not appear on the site but could be unblocked, if legit, by the author (for example). It would be quite a lot of work to program that, tho...

What do you think?

I'm not sure how a spam filter could be programmed that didn't either

A: Make commenters enter extra information (like the visual letters confirmation) which they don't tend to appreciate,

or B: leave it up to the author to approve or deny every comment, making the comment/voting system kinda meaningless.

Just report the spam comments with the 'report' link for now anyway, if the admins see it's spam they trash it.

Well there are automated solutions based on artificial intelligence, such as Bayesian spam filters, that "learn" which messages are spam and which aren't, using statistics, patterns or neural networks (or a mix of those)... I've seen that implemented on a couple of blog engines as well as on mail servers.

Of course the main problem is the "learning" part: at first the spam filter doesn't know how to recognize spams from non-spams, so the human operator needs to "tell" it which messages are spam (usually by clicking on a "report spam" button located next to the message). After a couple of days of learning, the filter is able to recognize automatically spams.

That would raise the problem of abuse, such as authors marking bad comments as "spam" (when in reality they're genuine comments) and the bayesian filter would get confused if that happens too much, and start to filter out genuine comments (false positives), or leave spams in place (false negatives).

It's not such a good idea after all! But it was fun thinking about it . OK I might have a strange definition of "fun"...