22 June 2012

I'm reinstituting captchas for comments

Six weeks ago I modified the settings of TYWKIWDBI to eliminate the annoying "word verification" step for comment submission.  Since then I have been deluged with spam - maybe 15/day just for "payday loans" alone.

I wish I could have Elisha unleash a she-bear on the spammers, but lacking that option, I've put captchas back on the comments.  Sorry, but cleaning the comments was wasting too much of my time.

12 comments:

  1. You're lucky--the ones I've been getting mostly involve Viagra, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Have you considered switching to Disqus comments? I've installed it on a few sites of authors I work with. It's much better at filtering out spam, and doesn't need captchas to do it.

    http://disqus.com/admin/blogger/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Facebook comments also work well... though that requires people to use Facebook.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Have you considered using a honey pot? http://devgrow.com/simple-php-honey-pot/

    ReplyDelete
  5. Don't worry about it! Anybody who can't be bothered to do a CAPTCHA probably doesn't have anything good to say anyways. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Glad to see the return of captchas. I am a Nigerian prince and I have an abundance of captchas which I need your assistance in accessing. I will send you Canadian viagra, in return, you will forward this message to ten people or your eyes will burn out and you'll be possessed.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I just posted a comment and had to refresh the captcha image six times, before it showed anything I could decypher.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm sorry about that - and to make matters worse, the payday loan spam keeps appearing, even with captchas in effect.

      Delete
  8. Switch your email to Gmail! It's easy (You can still use your existing ones through them too) and they have the best spam filters out there! I used to get almost a hundred spams a day. Gmail filters out about 98 -99% of it. I got rid of word verification on my blogs and my spams haven't increased any. Gmail's filters are on the ball.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't think that would solve the problem. The spam shows up here, on post comments - not in my email.

      Delete
  9. Have you can enabled spam detection on blogger? And if you opt in for blog owner approval, it will come to your email first and most likely be deleted.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Absolutely. Blogger catches the bulk of the spam, but not all of it. And everything goes through one of my mailboxes for approval.

      Delete

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