It’s a never ending battle that all honest people face due to unscrupulous people who seek to drive their business through unethical practices. Given the chance to work around the system, spammers will find any way they can to position their unsolicited information in your face no matter how many preventive measures taken to thwart them. For most of us bloggers, fighting blog comment spam is like trying to fight an avalanche with a garden spade. The longer your blog is operational and the more successful it becomes through publishing original content, the more comment spam you will find yourself fighting. Even the best spam filtering systems still have holes to be exploited and like death and taxes in life, in the blogosphere you can count on there being some comment spam to deal with every time you login to your blogging software’s control panelor dashboard.
In an effort to combat comment spam, I’ve noticed many bloggers turning to “captcha” codes to prevent bots from spamming their blog. By “captcha”, I’m not talking about the typical “Are you human” question/response type of check but I’m talking about the type of obscured, embedded image that expires after a set amount of time. While these type of filtering devices may be good for website logins to prevent “brute force” password attacks, on a blog’s comments, these this type of protection is ridiculous and if you implement it on your blog, you will definitely lose only legitimate commentors. I’m writing this after I was at a particular blog that had a discussion related to thepost that was quite interesting and I felt I had sufficient knowledge to share with several of the previous commentors regarding questions they had been asking. So, I spent almost a half an hour typing in my comment that covered most of the questions and hit the submit button. To my dismay, I was greeted with a message that “the security code has expired”. Nice. The worst part was that whoever authored that coding abortion forgot to re-populate the form fields of my post, including the comment text which I’d worked half an hour on. I tried the back button and the session was set so not as to store the information in my post. Scratching my head, I pondered re-typing my comment from scratch but I was annoyed at the experience, so I closed the tab I was browsing in and said “forget about it”.
If this is the type of experience, you as a blog owner, want to provide to your end users and especially to people who are going to take the time to type out legitimate, helpful comments, you are going to lose those readers just like the afformentioned blog lost me. While the goal in blogging is to be memorable so you have repeat visitors who enjoy discussing your posts, being memorable for your site trashing comments because your captcha expired while the visitor was typing is not the impression you want to make on your visitors or fight spam.
I hate captcha. Either a) it is so hard to read I have to strain my eyes, meaning anyone who sees worse than me probably doesn’t see a damn thing or b) they are so easy it is pointless to have since bots will get around it anyway.
The worst thing about CAPTCHAs is when they don’t tell you if you if case matters. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. Another problem is that too many letters look like numbers and they don’t tell you if there should be numbers in there or not!
i think comments on blogs should be sent to the administrator through email and then allowed on the blog if it meets the standards. This would cut down on spammers but would be ore work for the mods.