I mentioned in this post here that this blog was getting a fair amount of comments from people with what appeared to be made up names.
When people post comments, I’m notified of their IP addresses which can then allow me to see their general location and whether it is residential.
One one single residential IP address hosted by Be Un Limited and which one search tool pinpoints to Waltham Forest (although I’m not sure how reliable that is), I’ve had commenters using the following names:
Vote King, Aktar, Laura, Nothing_but_the_Truth, Junior, Joyce Williams, E1 Resident, TH Resident, Shahid, Lena, Richard, Tony R
On another, I’ve had:
Aktar, TH Resident, Hussain, Tony R, Ignorance, Junior
On another, I’ve had:
Wake Up, Get Real, James Hughes, Samara, Truth, Rachel, Ebby, Jayson, Jo, Abdal
Someone seems to have been busy.
I’m relatively new to this blogging business and I realise that this is bound to happen, but there does seem to be a concerted attempt to ramp up the strength of opinion. Of course, some of the comments left by the above names are perfectly valid, but some are highly poisonous and defamatory.
For the moment I’ve decided to classify incoming messages from those IP addresses as spam, but I’d appreciate any advice from more experienced bloggers out there on what is best etiquette.
Astroturf is a problem and it’s better to take action and have a few good comments, rather than an apparently busy blog with a lot of confusing noise from these people.
Treat them as spam Ted. They can always email and ask you nicely to let them have one more chance.
Hilarious! U can’t make it up!?!