When I built my blog website at the beginning, I designed the system so that only a logged-in user can add comments, because I want to try user account management with Spring Security. The result is no one comments on my blogs. I thought signing up to a strange website with email and password may not be comfortable for many people. So about three weeks ago, I opened up the comment function, and everyone can comment without a login. It is like many other blog sites, that commenters can just leave their name, email, website address and comment. I hoped this change would encourage people to comment on my blog. But you can never predict other people’s behaviors.

I was busy at work recently, and didn’t check my website often. Yesterday I took a visit to my blog, and found my last post had 29 comments. Although I didn’t expect my post to suddenly get such a big attention, it made me excited. When I opened the post page, OH MY JIWHIZ, my blog was flooded with spam!

I don’t mind if you post your website link to my blog, as long as it is technology related. But online cheap shoes? Hair Straightener? I’m not in the online retail business. I recorded your IP and emails, and you are banned from my site forever :-)

It is interesting that you assumed your users would appreciate your hard work to improve their user experience, but in reality, they might use your product in a totally different way than you had imagined. Anyway, that is another topic to discuss at another time.

I deleted all the spam comments, and disabled the comment function. Now I’m working on a new user account system to enable easy sign-in with a social network account through OAuth, like Twitter, Facebook or Google account. Fortunately Spring Social has a wonderful support for integrating application with OAuth provider. So hopefully after this change, it will be really easy to signin/signup with just one button. Stay tuned.