27/01/2013

PSA: Captchas turned on

I've turned on captchas as a requirement for commenting because unfortunately I've seen a huge rise in spam comments lately. While Blogger is pretty good about filtering them out so that they don't show up on the site, I still get an e-mail notification for every single one of them and it's been getting pretty annoying.

We'll see if this helps - if not, I might have to turn off anonymous commenting instead, which would be a real shame as I have quite a few readers (guildies etc.) who don't have any kind of account to sign in with and who like to just leave their name.

So let's hope that captchas do help with my spam problem - even if Blogger's have convinced me that I must be at least part robot, considering how often I fail to enter them correctly myself.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

5 comments :

  1. Congrats on being big enough to be worth spamming, I suppose? :-/

    I have had roughly the same problem for at least a year now, but I just filter comment emails from blogger into a folder and resign myself to the fact that the overwhelming majority of notices I get are spam that isn't actually appearing on the site.

    The only problem is that there have been a few cases where the spam filter gets it wrong and I don't find out about it because it's right 99% of the time. One of my more frequent commenters did something to irk the spam filter people and his stuff goes straight to the spam folder even though it's relevant and has no links in it. Meanwhile, that post of mine that you linked had a bunch of gambling-related spam approved as valid comments, and I can only assume the filter thought they were okay because I'd raised the issue of gambling RE: cartel packs in the text of my post.

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, I had that problem with a legitimate commenter as well. It makes me paranoid about just mass-deleting everything flagged as spam. I'd rather the stuff didn't get posted in the first place.

      Delete
  2. What I do is turn on comment moderation for posts that are two weeks old. 99% of those comments are spam, and you can mark them as spam all at once, and you won't get an email about it.

    You'll still get email about spam on posts which are less than two weeks old, but that's livable with.

    I wish Blogger would allow me to turn off comments on all posts older than two weeks. That would cut a huge amount of spam off.

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  3. I had an increase in spam as well, and turning Anonymous comments off was indeed what I needed. I do the same as Rohan, moderation for older posts (10 days for me). They seem to be the target for most spammers.

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    1. I don't know, I'm pretty sure that at least half (if not more) of the spam comments I've received were posted in reply to entries on the front page. Still, it's another option to consider I guess.

      Delete

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