Engadget Temporarily Turns Off Comments

Posted on June 25, 2005

Engadget, a popular gadget blog, has temporarily switched off comments because they are overwhelmed with comment spam and trolls.

Don't worry, it's only temporary. It's just that we've all gotten a little tired of spending so much time deleting comment spam and dealing with trolls and all that "first post!" crap, so we're switching off comments on new posts for the next day or two while we think about what we're going to do to try and make the comment boards not completely sucky. This was the first morning in months where I didn't have to spend the first 45 minutes of my day deleting spam and banning trolls, and I can't say that I hated it.

In the meantime Engadget tells readers to use the "linking blogs" feature which points to a search on Technorati that lists blogs linking to that particular Engadget post. A lot of websites have added this feature recently as an alternative to trackbacks. This feature will work as long as the blog search engines can keep the majority of spam blogs out of their databases.