February 24, 2012

The Captcha Dilemma

No doubt you've been annoyed by a Captcha at some point! You know what I mean — a couple of words with distorted letters that are challenging to read, printed on some noisy background. You have to type them into a box in order to do something, like comment on a blog post.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart and the idea is that a person can read it but a "bot" or software program cannot. (Read more about Captcha on Google.

It's a good idea, but lately the Captchas on Blogger have gotten so hard to decipher that readers are giving up and just not entering comments. For that reason, I have removed "Captcha" verification from my blog comments but added moderation for comments on posts more than a week old. Immediately I started getting spam comments. I marked them as spam and they went away. So we'll see how it goes.

I really like getting comments. This blog averages 70-something visitors a day but only a few comments a week. I'd love to get more, as long as they are from real people and not virtual robots.

5 comments:

  1. I'm sorry to read you got some spam after switching off Captcha.
    Personally I moderate everything.
    I was on the blogger help forum and this latest change has made such a furore that many are no longer commenting. Its a sad day all round for those who blog.

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  2. Hi Linda.
    Thank you for your comment on menem blog. I am glad that you like my tiger.
    The prbleme the captcha I have also. Then I turned it off and get so much spam that I have it turned on again.
    I wish you a nice day
    Elsbeth

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  3. Pat and Elsbeth, Thanks for your comments. I hope that Blogger fixes the Captcha gadget so that it is easier to read. I am not on the internet much during the day and I hate to make commenters wait for me to moderate them. I'm trying to find a middle ground that works smoothly.

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  4. I use both Blogger and WordPress platforms. One of the advantages I see to WordPress (and that is not to say one platform is better than the other) is the Akismet SPAM blocker. 99.9% of the time, it catches the spam.

    I don't use Captcha as I feel safe from the spam. However I do moderate comments because my blog is routinely "archived". I'd rather not have an offensive comment stick in some archived copy of the site. You see, while WordPress does a good job blocking spam, it is terrible for blacklisting individuals by IP or name.

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  5. Craig, thanks for your tips. I've changed my settings to disallow anonymous comments because that's where the spam was coming from. I hope it doesn't prohibit anyone from commenting.

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