Getting rid of SPAM comments in BlogEngine.NET

I have been running this website on BlogEngine.NET version 2.0.0.36 for over a year now. I like the interface and the familiar .NET coding environment. One of the biggest drawbacks to this blog software is the proliferation of SPAM comments that are entered on my site. I began to take for granted that I would never get rid of them. Every a few days, I got notified that there was a new comment on a post I made. Nearly every post was SPAM. I decided it was time to fight back. I didn’t want to loose control of the comments to a third party, or invent/borrow my own captcha system. Some day it may be necessary, but I don’t particularly like them. When I looked at my web logs for the site, I noticed that there were several searches for “powered by blogengine.net” and then some random term.

And they found my page because the footer of the page looked like the following

This got me thinking. I’m using the standard theme (Indigo) provided during installation of BlogEngine.net. I decided to try modifying the master page for this theme. Once I modified the theme, I have stopped getting SPAM comments to my site. If you’re interested, you should do the same.

1. Download the file /themes/Indigo/site.master
2. Change the text on line 64 FROM

<div class=”footer”>
        Powered by <a href=”http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/” target=”_blank”>BlogEngine.NET</a> <%=BlogSettings.Instance.Version() %> |
        Original Design by <a href=”http://arcsin.se”>Arcsin</a>, Adapted by <a href=”http://www.nyveldt.com/blog/”>RazorAnt</a>
</div>

To something like

<div class=”footer”>
    Thanks for visiting Snorkie.com
</div>

Then re-upload the site.master page and your site will have something like

Give it a try, but you might not be happy with the results. Now that I changed the text, I don’t have any comments on my entries. Now to get more traffic to my site!

Hogan