When are they commentary sincerely reacting to posts? When are they mere spam? And how should one draw the line? Dan Filler wonders at Faculty Lounge.
P.S. From UK lawyer-blogger Charon, Q.C. a while back: “Fed up with law firms putting ads in comment section of my blog. I am now editing and re-directing all such to dodgy websites.”
7 Comments
All law firm links are immediately suspect as spam, and are deleted unless we know that the firm has a “legitimate” blog or can determine that in about thirty seconds of research.
Illegitimate blogs include the one that Austin criminal lawyer Jamie Spencer (a legitimate blogger) lampooned in “If you too have driven a car into a pool.”
If it’s obvious comment spam that adds nothing to the post (“This is a great blog! I’ll be sure to visit again. May I add you to my blogroll?”), we send a polite email to the lawyer behind it. If we don’t get a response, if it makes us angry and we’re not too busy, we’ll call him/them out as spammers, in a front page post.
Well, imho, unless the comment really is spam, such as “great blog. you are really interesting. Signed Cheap shoes!” if there is any meat to the comment at all on the topic, then i say respond to it like any other comment.
I, for one, am in favor of Patrick’s approach. I enjoy reading about the drama that sometimes ensues. Granted, it takes a little more time to engage the offenders directly, but it seems like a fella could get some serious satisfaction out of it.
Eric Turkewitz has been calling out lawyers who do this on the New York Injury Law Blog. I really don’t care enough to do this but I do find it incredibly annoying to get these phony comments from lawyers or their agents.
The hard commenter to deal with is the hybrid. It is a lawyer, they did read the post enough to make a comment. But you know they are just trying to get a link in there.
This blog has a nice feature to allow commenters with a history of offering real commentary and automatic post. I can’t do that on my blog and sometimes I end up filtering out good comments as a result.
That better summarizes what I was trying to get at, the guy who writes something that tangentially reaches the post, but shows no effort at all. And you KNOW the comment will leave a link that reaches back to a law firm.
A favorite was from a “nationally recognized criminal defense firm” in Colorado where the paralegal behind the comment spam wrote, “Wow! That could be a 4th amendment violation!” in responding to a blogpost about … a 4th amendment violation.
One of the best benefits of WordPress, which I switched to from Blogger earlier this year, is the ability to edit comments. So you can kill the gratuitous link if you want and leave behind the good parts of the comment (if there are any).
If the comment adds nothing, is off-topic and/or is just link-begging or demanding, it goes in the trash.
There’s a few exceptions, but it’s a good rule of thumb.
(Now, smart would be telling their folks to blog on office hours, and add a disclaimer something like “the views above do not in any way shape or form needfully represent the views of (law office.)”)