Being active in social is great and having a blog is a lot of fun but sometimes everyone of us will face those people who just want to make your day worse. Have you ever wondered how to avoid getting those spammy and nasty comments?

 

The more audience you have more spam and inappropriate comments and messages you will have. I find it quite funny that some people are really using their lives writing staff like ”soon every part of your life will turn into shit, cannot wait xx” to posts (this is part of an actual comment to one of my posts). Don’t you really have anything better to do than write random things to others’ blogs?

 

 

The point is, if you’re writing or photographing some great positive content to your social try to just ignore and delete those comments. I always think that people doing that are either a) jealous to you (especially if the commenter happens to be from Finland – that’s like a national sin in here haha) or b) she or he is just miserable in his or her own life.

 

Additionally, remember that the person using his or her precious time trying to mock and deflate others does not reserve your time or attention. Personally, I just delete these comments without publishing or answering (if they ever make their way through WordPress spam filters – if not, I’ll probably never read those). In general, deleting all the hateful and harmful energy from your life is the best thing you can do.

 

 

 

How to Avoid Spam and Nasty Comments and Messages?

 

 

1. Use Spam Filters

 

Most blogs and sites offer you either free or cheap filters to use at your site. These will block the most obvious spam comments – like the ones advertising in your comment box, or the ones full of inappropriate words or typos.

 

Only downside in these is that sometimes they block normal nice comments too. I usually check my spam box every second week to check if there is something there should not be.

 

 

2. Require Logging in to a Social Account or Confirming via Email

 

Commenting anonymously is the easiest way to be nasty because without checking the IP of the commenter others will never know who it was. The more information you require the less spam you’ll get. For example, if the commenter must use his or her own Facebook profile or confirm via email it increases to possibility that the person does not want to send that nasty comment.

 

Additionally, when the spammer sees that the comments aren’t going to be visible it might make the person to lose his or her motivation to send more. With my blog this has worked well – one nickname leaves usually one spammy comment and when it will never go through there is not more coming.

 

The downside of this is that some nice and kind readers might skip the commenting if it’s too hard or if they don’t want to use their personal profiles.

 

 

3. Be Nice to Others

 

This is probably the most obvious one. Don’t make the fellow bloggers day bad – try to always be polite and friendly in groups, chats, comments, etc. You can of course share your honest opinion but try not to hurt others on the way. Or if you did that already, tell you’re sorry and try to fix the situation.

 

Also, make sure your content is mostly positive and try not to provoke anger. If you’re writing about things like lifestyle and style this should be relatively easy. If you’re writing about religion and politics this might be harder but try to focus on giving good vibes to the readers.

 

In this one there isn’t downsides really. Anyhow, this one isn’t probably the most efficient one. Let’s take this blog as an example: the goal of this blog is to inspire readers achieve their dreams by sharing my tips, recommendations and experiences. Quite positive idea, right?

 

Still there is 1-2 nasty comments every month. That’s less than in many other blogs similar in traffic but still, being positive is not going solve this issue totally but it might decrease the amount of those nasty comments.

 

 

4. Use Message Requests in Personal Facebook

 

For years I’ve used message requests in Facebook. This means that if a non-friend person wants to send you a message you’ll get a message request instead of the message. You’ll though see what the person wants to send to you.

 

If that’s something inappropriate, hateful or spammy you just decline the request and the other person will never know you did so. In message requests another handy thing is that the person trying to message you doesn’t see if you have read the message if you don’t accept the request.

 

These are handy because the request will be in different tab / folder than the actual messages so they won’t bother you while hidden there. And of course, if you accept the request everything works as normally in FB messenger.

 

The downside of this is that you might forgot to check the request folder and it will then take longer for you to ask nice and normal messages. However, this issue only takes place at the first time – after you’ve accepted the request you’ll see the message like all the other messages.

 

 

+ Ultimately you could also hide the blog behind a password. Personally I don’t like this idea because we should never ever give any power to those anonymous bullies of the web. However, if you’re blog is something like personal travel diary for friends and family, this might work for you.

 

Photos of this post are stock photos from Pixabay.

 

Have you faced hateful, angry or spammy comments? How do you react to them? What advice would you give to fellow bloggers facing those nasty comments?