A number of blogs hosted on our service were subjected to comment spam attacks last night and this morning. All of these blogs allowed Anonymous Comments. Our staff is currently in the process of removing the large majority of these spams on your behalf.

The best way to prevent comment spam is to disallow Anonymous Comments. Your blog will always be more susceptible to automated comment spam unless you require your readers to log in when they comment.

By requiring your users to sign in before commenting, we can help you even if you do get comment spam, since we can remove the user account which sent the spam, which will remove all objects associated with the user account.

To disable anonymous commenting, login to your blog control panel and click Settings & Security > Publishing Defaults > Advanced. Look for the row that shows "Anonymous Comments" and you can disallow Anonymous Reader comments by unchecking that box and clicking Save Settings at the bottom of the page. Your readers will now need to sign up for a Reader Account if they wish to post, but you will rarely see automated comment spam.

We are hard at working providing you with additional protections and options with respect to commenting, but at this time we must stress that disallowing Anonymous Comments is your best option.

Thanks again for hosting your blog with BlogHarbor, and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about this issue.