Blogger is one of the biggest blog hosting service in the world as of today. Considering the amount of posts and comments it gets everyday, spam messages have become a huge problem for it. Until now, bloggers had to either enable comment moderation or use CAPTCHA.
As Google’s software engineers, Saurav Shah and Junho Ryu mentioned in the official blogger blog, “Commenting is one of the most integral parts of blogging: it’s what makes blogging a conversation, not a monologue. That’s why we are pleased to announce two cool new improvements to Blogger’s comments system: much better spam filtering and the ability to view all comments on your blog in one place.“
As of today, Blogger is getting a comments manager. Google has rolled out 2 new features for Blogger, namely Comment spam filtering and Comments inbox. The comments can now be viewed under the new comments tab, which are split into 3 categories: Published, Awaiting Moderation and Spam (see image below). The blog owners can see any comment made on their blog and delete it or remove it from the same page. They can also mark it as spam which will delete it immediately.
Additionally, Blogger will now use Google’s spam filtering technologies, similar to the one used in Gmail, for comments. Any suspicious comment will be moved to the Spam tab and will not be displayed on the blog. From the Comments section, the blog owner will be able to remove the spam comments or mark them as ‘Not Spam’ if that is the case.
As with most of Google’s new services, this feature will be gradually rolling out to all users, so some of the users may not see the new Comments tab yet. Eventually all users will be able to use it. This move by Google should enable users to have a completely open commenting system, i.e. without moderation or CAPTCHA check, without needing to fear of their blog getting overrun with pointless links. What is surprising is that it took Blogger all this time to introduce the feature while Google has some of the best spam filtering technologies around in use for Gmail.