YouTube Comment Spam

YouTube Comment Spam

Currently I have 25 videos on YouTube. They’re just clips of my Uncle Les (Sir Les Patterson to you), a few rare clips of Spinal Tap and a couple of others. I had my account options set so that whenever anyone commented on one of my videos I would get an e-mail. The e-mail text would just say that so-and-so has commented on my video. This was fine for a while. People would post questions about the clip, witty comments or just a quick note to say thanks for uploading it. I did delete some stupid comments but have pretty much left them as they are.

The majority of video clips that I've posted have taken quite a bit of effort to put on YouTube. I've copied the show from my HDD recorder onto a DVD+RW disk. From the disk ripped and converted it to an mpeg file then edited it using either QuickTime or iMovie HD then exported to a file suitable for uploading to YouTube.

Probably just over a month ago I started to get spam comments. I don’t want to have some idiot posting spam comments on my videos so I was just blocking the user then deleting them. This became a little annoying so I changed the settings on all 25 videos so that the comment could only be allowed after I'd approved them. Of course this didn’t stop the spammers. Whenever I found a spam comment I blocked the user and removed the offending comment. At the time of writing I have 33 blocked users. This figure won’t increase anymore because today I switched off comments on all 25 videos.

It’s a shame because I have enjoyed reading what people have said. Little leanne0 really made my day when she commented on Sir Les & David “Granola”.

So what can YouTube do to fight the spammers? Firstly the ‘Spam’ link doesn’t seem to do anything but hide the comment from view. I read through the Help Centre and didn’t find out what it actually does. What it should do is count how many comments have been flagged as spam for a user and ban them if they reach a certain number. Or they need to implement an immediate ban if a user has been blocked more than say 5 times. I've always clicked on their user name link to find out more about them. Usually I see a list of people who have had their videos spammed commenting back.

Personally I can’t see why people bother commenting at all. I've watched some really great clips on YouTube but have never felt compelled to type ‘lol’ or ‘lmfao’ in the comment box.