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Monday 28 January 2013

Spambots and Captchas

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I hate captchas.  If you don't know what captchas are, they are those annoying letters and numbers you have to copy correctly to prove you're not a spambot (spam robot) before you can comment on a blog post.

I usually surf blogs from my iPad, which just makes copying captchas even harder, because they are so hard to see.

"Please prove that you're not a computer."  I'm not a computer, but apparently, I'm blind.

Sometimes I write this really clever comment, and then after 3 or 4 unsuccessful attempts at posting, I get discouraged and leave the site.

A friend of mine who recently started blogging was using the dreaded captchas, so I asked him nicely to disable them.  He mentioned that he used to have a lot of issues with spammers, but I was all "No, no, Bloggers spam filter is really good.  They go directly to spam, never actually get published!"

Well!

It's like Murphy himself heard me and decided it was a great time to apply his law.  Suddenly, I'm receiving tons of spam comments, and they are actually getting through the spam filter.

The worse part is the repetitive nature of the comments:

"Great post! I've been looking for this information for days, and you really hit the nail on the head with this one.  Also, please visit my website... something cigarettes.com"

Some are even insulting:

"Is it just me or do some of the comments on this post sound like they're coming from brain dead people? :)-  Also, please visit my site... something money solutions .com."

"There is very a lot of good infomation on this website, but you should realy check you're speling, as you make lot of mistakes.  Also, please visit my site: casino something .com."

Haha! Thanks for the tip.

So now I don't know what to do.  I want people to be able to post anonymously to my blog.  I don't want to force people to log in or reveal themselves.  Some of my posts are about depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder, I want my readers to feel free to write what they are really feeling, without fear of retribution.

So I suppose I'll keep things as is for now, but if you see a spambot comment, rest assured, it will be deleted soon.

What do you do to avoid both the dreaded captchas and the dreaded spambot?

3 comments:

  1. Hey Felicia,

    That's a right move :) Something I wasn't aware of in first days and I thought the security matters in first place. But I was shocked after hearing from friends that captchas prevent commenting on my blog.

    A close friend of mine taught me the lesson by posting a guest post about it on my own blog and since then no more captchas for me :)

    Especially it's irritating if someone surf your blog via mobile devices :)

    Spammers are always out there. However if you prefer, you can check out Disqus comment system which is compatible with Blogger and it catches spammers automatically too. Less work on moderation :) Well, check out and decide what's best for yours.

    Cheers...

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  2. I LOATHE those stupid things! Some of them have almost given me an aneurysm trying to get them right. I get those annoying spam comments as well. IRRITATING. But what's a blogger to do??? :)

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  3. Wow!.... This Bloggers spam filter is really good....

    Thank you. Death by captchas

    ReplyDelete