I got up this morning to check and respond to comments on my blog I found that there were 140 comments left overnight. 130 of them were complete spam. It took a few minutes to delete all of the garbage comments.
Because of this I am going to re-implement the captcha service for leaving a comment. In order to leave a comment you will now have to answer a simple math question i.e. 2+7=?.
I really don’t want to do this because it discourages comments and I love getting feedback from people and answering their questions.
But 130 garbage comments overnight is too many to sift through.
I am using Akismet to detect garbage comments and I could automatically throw away everything it marks as spam. But occasionally it will mark a good comment as spam and I don’t want to lose those comments.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Ya people did that on my blog. They went through and would put 20-30 links in a post and then spam it all over the page. Its people like that which makes it harder for all of use to win at this Internet marketing game.
Very true. I was sad that I had to re-implement the captcha. But I just couldn't handle the number of spam comments.
Oh well! It was worth a try Nick. Be interesting to see whether you got any extra 'real' comments by removing the captcha. Do you know if you did?
Tom
That was the original idea. I wanted to see if I got more comments without it. Unfortunately I only had 36 hours before I was overrun with spam comments. This makes it really hard to tell if it had any impact on the number of comments I receive.
In a typical day I get anywhere from 5 to 25 comments. Yesterday I had 23 comments. The day before, when I had the captcha removed, I had 5 or 6 comments. So I have no idea if it helped.
I think it's no problem to do the simple math, but I would be surprised if that captcha offers much defense against the black hatters since the sum appears in the page source.
Maybe the spam karma plugin might be an option? I think this tries to detect signs of spam with a scoring algorithm rather than responding to previously flagged spam reports.
I also had doubts about a numeric captcha since a programmer could look at the math problem and compute the sum with a computer program. But I was dissatisfied with traditional captchas because they're a pain for people.
So I gave it a try and found the numeric captcha stops 95% of all the spam I got without the captcha.
I also use Akismet which is very good at flagging spam comments. The only trouble is that I will get over 100 a day and mixed in with those 100 are two or three legitimate comments. This means I still have to sift through all the spammy comments to make sure I didn't miss any legitimate ones.
Keep the captcha, we understand. I have to delete bot comments every morning and it gets old fast. I could be doing a lot more with my time. I also just can't delete all of them because the spam filter does catch some honest comments.
That sounds exactly like what I go through. It seems like pretty much everyone understands about the captcha and I appreciate that.
Is there any way I can use Captcha to direct people from one website to another. These websites are related and infact look the same….
I don't understand what you mean. Can you elaborate?
Don't worry! I got a few things mixed up. Thanks, anyways.