Hi Greg! While I totally agree with you that the spam is impacting our SEO, I refuse to go back to over 3,000 blog posts each day to check for spam. 

That said, like on our WordPress sites, there could be a spam alert here OR the owners could (and I believe they are working on this) address the spam directly from the source (membership). 

We paid our dues to become lifelong members and many are still paying for their membership. In return, I believe this should be handled by the 'company,' not the members.

No. We are not the curators of AR. We should not be punished for the bad actions of others.

That is not my job. The spam should be monitored at the highest level.  I monitor spam on my WordPress site by setting the need for me to approve comments.  If not approved they are marked as spam. 

I can't say I've ever felt overwhelmed with spam comments on my posts... they  have been few and far between. I can certainly monitor more recent posts but it's impossible for those of us who have thousands of posts to continually monitor them all. But back to my comment that the spam is few and far between... in the past two months I've updated some 1,000 of my older posts for links, photos, etc. and came across not one single spam comment.

Not sure I'm for disabling comments.... part of the "fun" in Active Rain is the back and forth with other members through our comments on each other's posts.

They are working on it.  A

I'd prefer AR spent their time/energy preventing spammers, not in requiring that I do it.

It's best not to delete the spam comments yourself so that the staff can block the IP addresses of those spamming.  Reporting them is the best thing to do.

When I find them I delete or report them.

    I can't monitor 1400 blog posts.   AR Staff is going to have to solve this problem.

I like what Debe Maxwell, CRS had to say....  I usually find them on my featured posts.... but there are hundreds of them.... AR should be filtering that out....

Umm, no.  We have blogs going back for years.   A single featured post can result in a hundred "commented" emails (and QA is even worse).  So no again.  

We are the content creators, not site management.  AR is a paid platform for thousands of agents, not an individual platform that promotes my business ---- why should content creators, many of whom pay, be responsible for something like that?

Greg,

It is easy for us to monitor our comments, yet few do.  My active rain link goes directly to the "my_home" page, which shows all my notifications.  It's easy to click the dropdown to select "Blog Comments" and review... it's just a matter of do people interact with their comments or not.  Each time I come here, I go through all of my notifications and clear out the meaningless ones (likes, upvotes, etc.) and review each tag and comment.

Again, are people willing to do this.  I've had users leave legit answers on questions 3 years old recently.  Pretty odd, but I saw it.

Requiring moderation would be nice, but I think most people here would balk at it.  For the most part, I just disable commenting.  One forum I'm on requires a set level of interaction (15 posts) before they'll allow links in your replies.  I think something like that for blogs would be nice.  I also like the idea of disabling links in comments entirely, even if the random use case would be hurt by it.

As far as AR being a platform for promoting spam, I did a search on a "specialized" SEO forum I'm on and AR was mentioned back in 2011 there as being a place to get high quality free backlinks... so the problem has potentially been around for a while.

NOPE!

That's AR's job. Definitely a leadership fault, not a membership fault.

I do not review old posts regularly, I have several hundred over 10 years and not that kind of time unless AR wants to pay my $150/hr rate?

Good idea, disabling links in the comments. My pitchfork is currently in the shop 😈 but it would be nice to resolve this one issue. They're working on it, we've been told.

Hmmm,

Let's see. These same publishers must visit their blogs everyday to confirm the fonts are as they should be.

These same publishers must visit their blogs everyday to see if AR has mangled the blog format. and spend hours fixing it when it happens.

These same publishers must review the comments and respond to participants as appropriate.

These same publishers can also deal with the spam too.

My point is the inordinate care and feeding required of AR blogs reveals a more substantial problem. It is not to require MORE of publishers but to at a minimum require a cell number to verify members...to get the code like all the others SM sites requirement. (of course empowering Ambassadors with 'nuclear' capability could vaporize the account of spammers)

My recommendation is for members to cease publishing blogs on AR or at least turn of comments after 5 days. That does not cure the other inherant AR malidies.

To REQUIRE more of the publishers is misguided.

I don't think so. Whenever I get a comment, I get an email that i have comments. When I have time to go in to see the comments, I report the spam comments, if there are any. 

AR set up a long time ago, back when I started blogging in 2007- that we could report the spam comments, then the AR support team deleted and blocked those people. 

Adding this to my comment: 

For those who have free accounts, being on AR is still not "free". There is no such thing as free. When I started on AR, we had spammers then too. 

We members who have been here for many years, I am going on 12 year.. we are the ones who built AR not the other way around. 

We built this platform because without all of us, the early adapters to AR, they would never have been able to monitize the platform. It is us that got them all the SEO, that did not happen to AR through osmosis. 

So we paid our dues... in more ways than just blogging too. 

Fortunately for me on every site I maintain (except this one) I can monitor the posts BEFORE they are published so I can remove links as needed and not publish as needed.

John Juarez 's answer gets my vote

Always report spam when you see it, but monitor past blogs, definitely not!

I am available, how much does it pay?  I can read about 150 of the 30,000 they get daily.

I hope the staff will block those who leave spam comments.

How would you monitor? We do not always get notices about comments anyhow, and some spam shows up in old posts.

At some point, the platform might become too time consuming for the users with the changes you propose. Still; something must be done.

Something needs to be done.

oh boy !

Some never see/read comments on their posts, and it is the blogger's responsibility.

No.

Greg Cremia - I report the spam if I find one. Collectively we can do it. However, a good spam filter is highly recommended.

Lose the ability to receive comments?   Who are  you, Big Brother?

I just put the word "gucci" in the AR search bar to see if the problem is pervasive.

Over 400 blog posts came up with "Gucci" in the spammy comments. 

Will never happen.