Who hates “comment spam”? I do!
Comment spam blows. I’ve seen it becoming more and more common on many blogs that I read daily, and it was also slowly increasing in numbers on this site. Back when I was using Blogger to manage this site, there wasn’t much that I could do other than simply delete the offending comments from the post. I understand that Blogger now has some sort of comment spam detecting system, though it doesn’t seem to be making a difference. Either most people aren’t aware of it, or maybe they have to manually enable it somehow, or maybe it just doesn’t work very well.
Since I converted my blog to Wordpress, I have only occasionally had to deal with comment spam. Recently, though, it has increased to the point that is almost unbearable. Wordpress has some basic comment spam detecting features built-in. I recently configured my blog to hold for moderation any comments that contained any links at all. The comments are first delivered to my email address, then I can approve them or delete them. There were several significant problems with this method. One, while I was on vacation recently, there were several legitimate (and very helpful, thanks RM!) comments that were held and didn’t get posted for a few weeks. I can imagine that the comment writers weren’t sure why their comment didn’t immediately show up.
The bigger problem with this system is that many spam comments didn’t actually have a link in the body of the message itself, so they were still posted without being held for approval.
So I had a choice. I could configure my blog to allow comments only from people after they register as a user, but I didn’t want to force people to do that. I know that when I want to leave a simple comment about something on a blog I’ve stumbled upon, if I’m forced to register with the site first, I’ll usually just click away, keeping my comment to myself.
I could moderate each and every comment. This means that I would have to approve every single comment that someone leaves, filtering out all the garbage comments left by spambots. I don’t get a huge number of legitimate comments, but I’ve been getting literally 35+ spam comments each day. I felt that this method was also unaccaptable.
What I chose to do is implement a Captcha system when leaving comments, using the SecureImage plugin. Captcha is a goofy acronym for an even goofier phrase that I’m not going to bother spelling out. What it does is pretty cool, though. When you leave a comment, you’ll be prompted to fill in the usual stuff like your name, email address, etc, as well as verify a random string of characters that is generated on the fly and presented in a graphical format that spambots can’t read. No registration required by you, no moderation required by me, immediate posting of comments.
Try it out now by leaving a comment on this post.
14 comments October 5th, 2005