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.

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  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/

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

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

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  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. ;-)

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  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.

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

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

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  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.

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

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  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.

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    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.

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