Friday, January 11, 2013

Captchas are baaack.

I really do not like to use them, especially Googles, but I keep getting comments linking products.  I will not buy those products no matter what they are and I will no longer tolerate those who put them in my comments.

Therefore I have enabled the PIA captchas.

9 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry to hear that! (Just came over here to try them out myself and see if the pictures are more legible these days.) Perhaps the spammer will burn himself out eventually - I have been lucky so far, knock on wood.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I wish it was that easy Adwoa, but they're bots that run without being monitored. Just part of the life we live with the net these days, I guess. Until at least Google start to do something about the spamming, other than relying on such draconian systems as Captcha.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've been fiddling and experimenting with the settings, and so far the one that has served me best is this: allow comments, only by members of the blog, with captchas disabled. So far that, and Blogger's built-in spam filters, have maitained my blog clean (knock on wood). I was getting comments along the lines of "... I found your blog, it's fantastic, here's my link", but that's a thing of the past since I required posters to register.

    ... Maybe that explains why my blog gets so little comments, come to think of it...

    ReplyDelete
  5. I don't use captchas and do get spam, but 9 times out of 10 the spam comments are filtered out by Blogger and never appear on the site. I also disallowed anonymous comments, which cut down on the spam.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I thank the High Jebus every day for Akismet, the wordpress plugin. That bugger catches spam 99.9999999998% of the time and files it all in a spambox for me to look at and then press the shiny, red "empty spam" button. It's just about flawless. :D

    ReplyDelete
  7. Sorry to hear that.

    I do not use captcha. I've been getting as many as 4 spam comments a day this week, but most days, I didn't get a single one - and they are all that clumsy that the filter has no problem catching these. I also noticed that interestingly, some old posts seem to attract spam en masse - I disabled comments for these posts in the post editor - options.

    The most outrageous spam I've received so far went like this:

    Howdy, i read your blog occasionally and i was curious if you get a lot of spam feedback? If so how do you stop it, any plugin or anything you can advise? also visit my website: ****** pills.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Funny! My spam comments tend to come through to my e-mail account but by the time you check in the commentary, they are gone. It IS pretty minimal though and doesn't cause me any upset. My settings are: Registered User - includes OpenID. Moderation: Never. Show Word Verification? No.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I use moderation. I've seen spam show up on some Typosphere blogs that have captchas enabled. There is always someone poor enough to do paid placement by hand when a bot can't break through.

    ReplyDelete