Darren has written a post entitled “Hitting Comment Spammers and Plagiarists where it hurts” in which he outlines how he deals with the timewasters and thieves who clutter his blogs with spam, steal and republish his content, and generally irritate.

How much time and energy to devote to fighting these negative influences is a matter of personal choice.

I think we need to be careful of spending large amounts of time fighting things that are often beyond our control, when other methods could be used to reduce the amount of time we waste.

I’m all for reporting and trying to close down the operations of spammers and sploggers when I think it is an effective use of my time, though generally I’d rather ensure my own defences are strong, and continue to do all the positve things I can to create a powerful site that thrives no matter what is thrown at it.

Practically, what do I do?

Comment spam is usually effectively dealt with by Wordpress plugins such as Akismet and Spam Karma. I still have the occasional unpleasant task of sifting through it to make sure nothing legitimate has been caught out, but it doesn’t take much of my time.

I don’t currently have a huge problem with content theft, but when I do, a polite but firm email to the offending site owner often does the trick. When it doesn’t, I’ll weigh up whether it’s worth pursuing - often it’s very obvious which is the legitimate, orginal site (i.e. mine), and if it’s going to take me more than 5 minutes to do something about it, I’d rather leave it alone and write more content instead.

I try not to get personally involved with splogs in general - if I see one and I can quickly report it, I’ll do so. Some would say I’m passing the buck, and keeping the problem alive by doing nothing. Maybe so, but I don’t have the time or energy to fight it. ISPs and blog service providers should be doing this.

Don’t let your energy get sapped by negative Internet forces.