Friday, November 16, 2012

Dear Other Bloggers

Are captchas really necessary on your blogs? Do you get that much spam that you need to frustrate real commenters with impossible to read letters of made up words?

Or maybe my blog is so unknown and sad that the spambots ignore it out of disgust. *shrugs*


14 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:22 am

    Oh my god this.

    I would comment far more often on blogs if they didn't have a million hoops to jump through. More often than not I'm on a mobile device anyhow. Don't make me try to read tiny inscrutable pictures and words that aren't words.

    WordPress.com does an outstanding job of quarrantining spam posts - for free.

    -Rhavas (@EVE_Rhavas)

    PS - Enable "Name/URL" on your commenting Kirith! My Wordpress site name is not the same as my EVE ID and I'm not posting my Google account on an EVE blog. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, as much as captchas can annoy me, at least they are better than sites that make you create an account to comment. I have too many accounts and passwords already for that to work.

    Anyway, I've survived 6+ years without feeling the need for captcha on my blog. Of course, maybe I am just not a target either.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I share your sentiments. I do believe I switched mine off a good while back. I hope that the option is still switched off. It's so annoying. I know that sometimes when it looks like an ancient secret alphabet on the screen I just click close and don't bother commenting.


    MB.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @interstellarprivater ; Sorry, don't have that option yet :/

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have never used it. And I have never had a problem. I get some spam comments from time to time and then I delete them. Presto! So I fully support this idea and I'm glad it wasn't me who posted it. :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Very much supported!

    I turned my capcha off a few months ago, because they're getting so bad that I usually have to refresh a few times before I get one that I can actually read.

    I also allow anomymous commenting and don't have moderation turned on other than for old posts.

    Since turning it off, I haven't had a single spam comment get through blogger's built in spam feature.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Good point! Mine now turned off. I was moaning about them myself the other day without realising my own blog had them. I'll see how it goes.

    ReplyDelete
  8. What the above commentators failed to mention is that they're are all spam bots perpetrating their secret spam agendas!

    In all seriousness yes captcha sucks and the delay between posting my gut reaction and then fiddling with captcha makes me reread and realize how silly my posts were and then not bother trying to figure out the captcha.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Voices gets 15+ spam comments per day, after internal measures & turning of comments completely. :( My parody songs are on some list.

    That said, I made my captua a picture puzzle because those word ones are annoying.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Oh yes please, sometimes I feel like I don't know how to read as some say that I failed again and again...

    ReplyDelete
  11. Or needing to log in....pref captcha to logging in

    ReplyDelete
  12. thank you for posting this,

    I have not made several posts on other "EvE Bloggers" due to being unable to read 'capture' codes...

    ReplyDelete
  13. Captchas stop comments. But syndicating the first few lines stops reading. I can vaguely understand why some bloggers would rather you visit their site, but RSS feeds exist to make life easier. Firewalls stop me visiting most gaming websites at work, during lunch even, and I'd much rather read my feed than visit a dozen different web pages, with different designs, font sizes, and colour schemes.

    Maybe you can do all a favour and rail against that too.

    ReplyDelete
  14. At first, I never used captcha's


    My choices are

    * Allow automated spam onto the website without any defences. I had at one point 200 spam comments on a blog in 12 hours.
    * Moderate all comments (deferring comments and risking the appearance of censorship)
    * Captcha; reduces the excesses of both legitimate and illegitimate postings

    Finally; I just decided that in the majority of instances, my own blog was a good place to say what I thought needed to be said.

    ReplyDelete