May 31
Fighting Spam…Part 2,842
I have added one additional weapon in the arsenal against spam here at Patrick’s Place. It’s an extra plugin that will require comments it deems as “questionable” to be validated with a captcha function.
Captcha is that system that shows distorted letters or numbers and requires a user to type what they see. But wait…it’s not as bad as you think!!
It will only require you to do so if it sees something in your comment that it thinks might be spam. So for those of you who normally comment, you should have no problem at all. If it does think something is amiss, it’ll give you the additional test, and then your comment should make it to my moderation cue. And in most cases, I’m fairly quick about moderating comments.
I’ve added this for two reasons:
First, I have discovered recently that some perfectly legitimate comments from perfectly real people were being thrown into the spam filter for reasons that didn’t seem clear to me. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, because I could just click over and scan through the crap and pick out the good ones.
Second, the amount of crap piling up in the spam filter has reached an unmanageable point. I had to scan through 21 pages of spam comments — more than 1000 individual pieces of spam, with any number of “interesting” references to various body parts, just to salvage 2 legitimate comments.
Sorry, kids…that’s just no fun.
If you leave a comment and it gets flagged and you have to do the captcha thing, I apologize in advance. I hope that the system will quickly recognize you so that you don’t have to do it a second time. If you think you’re not getting through, click the Contact tab at the top of the blog and send me a note — that goes just to me, not as a published comment.
Hopefully, this will make sure that you get through quicker and that spambots don’t.
June 1st, 2008 at 7:49 am
We have had a huge influx in the sheer amount of SPAM on Home Ec. I’m thoroughly annoyed by the sorting process, as some of that stuff makes my heart hurt to even scan as I look for legitimate comments. Let me know how this works for you.
June 1st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
I have no problem with this. It has to work better than the stupid captcha program on blogger, which insists I do it twice for every comment.