Spam has once again become one of my little nightmares both here at the radical blogger and at my Just 4 Families parenting blog. It seem that when I write a post that draws a decent commentary it also seems to flag the spammers to have a go.
Andy Beard wrote a little blurb on Akismet and the frustrations it creates. I have used Akismet on both sites since Christmas. It has been great at stopping the spam, nothing is getting through although I often have to go in and extract non-spam comments. I would much rather be de spamming some comments than having to manually delete 10-15 spam comments each day – and that is on a good day.
My Just 4 Families site has been badly hit lately to the point that I turned comments off. That site is a Drupal powered site rather than WordPress. I have now installed a Captcha module (simple maths) and since then I have had no spam at all. I am assuming that all this spam has been bot driven.
My question now is what do you think about Captcha? I often find the word or character based captcha to be a pain in the butt, these blurry old eyes find it hard to distinguish the characters. The math based ones are not a problem.
Do you get turned off commenting because there is a captcha installed? From my experience, the captcha has worked well to kill the spam and certainly saved me a lot of time in going in and reviewing all the spammed comments before deleting them.
In the mean time – I am going to spam myself off to the San Diego sweetwater saloon at Hard Rock for a bit of time out after this last spate of spam and consider finding a simple captcha plugin for this site. (in case you are wondering – don’t ask).
I don’t really mind captcha IF they are easy to figure out AND work first time. I can understand the necessity in many cases. The blogger ones drive me absolutely crazy though!!!! Others I’ve come across don’t seem too bad. I prefer the maths ones for the same reasons you’ve highlighted however, I prefer the numbers don’t add up to more than 10 as then I run out of fingers!!!! LOL.
I have Tan Tan Noodles which helps filter out a certain amount of spam before it gets to Akismet and make it a daily habit to check Akismet and then empty it so there’s never too much in there to wade through checking for legitimate comments. This works okay for me but I wouldn’t say my blog is exactly busy when it comes to comments or spam.
I don’t mind at all as long as they are easy like lightning said. The ones in script writing are a real pain.
This is where my lack of popularity (though this isn’t a cry for pity or anything because I have decent visitors) is a godsend because I never have to manually delete mine on a daily basis – I only ever get about 5-7 spam messages a day. And most of the people that comment on my site are regulars so they were only caught once, so once I approved them they were good to go!
I agree too that the spam comments that I get seem to be really easy to identify… lots and lots of links or really silly names. Hope you find a better solution for your spam problems.