Having just been warned by the good Avus of how evil spammers have taken over Nea's blog, and gone to see the devastation for myself, I have put on comment verification.
I have been disinclined to do this in the past, and closer examination of my motives reveals this is the result of vanity, thinking that the extra moments it takes for a commenter to fill out the word verification will put them off leaving a comment, and I will receive fewer comments. How sad is that?!
Anyway, having seen the possible result of not doing, I'll take the chance of fewer nice things said for peace of mind and a clean blog. For myself, I think I very rarely fail to leave a comment if I want to simply because I can't be bothered to read the funny word, and in fact some of them are quite interesting; those disposed to find fortunes in tea-leaves and augurs in birds' droppings can find all kinds of messages of possible import in them!
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12 comments:
I like that positive spin of finding "fortunes in tea-leaves and augurs in birds' droppings"! This type of verification is not a bother, (I choose "other") unlike those that require one to register, which I tried on my blog and gave up on. It seems that the inner workings of Movable Type have kept a handle on this on my blog lately. Easy enough to to not approve the spammers. I also turn off commenting on older posts.
Sorry for your blogger friend. I use it too, so it's no bother to use it here.
Not sure what is going on at Nea's. It's there and it's not there. Is this really from spam comments or just a blogger glitch? (Nea does tweak her template fairly often, I think). Doesn't seem to serve much purpose if it is just spam.
I don't have verification on at present. Every so often a robot-spammer finds my site and posts ads with links to other sites. I delete these immediately (I'm a bit of a computer tragic so catch them early). Sometimes there is a surge of them (I had 36 appear at once one day) and then I will turn verification on for a few days until it goes away.
Why don't I leave it on? Don't know. Simplicity.
The verification that gives me the most grief is Typepad as it 'appears' after I think I have posted successfully and am about to move on. Sometimes I have moved on and only later do I realise that my carefully crafted comment has not been received as I have closed the tab before verifying.
Maybe it's not meant to be easy?
There's a special rung in hell reserved for spammers. I had to turn on comment verification due to spammers, and I still get spam from some intrepid die-hards. I've had to physically turn off comments on old posts one by one, since TypePad doesn't have a utility for shutting off all comments from X date backwards. Anyway, I also like your tea-leaf reading analogy. Verification on this post? qjwewo - sounds like Elmer Fudd in spanish.
The only problem with captchas, as they're called, is that they're hell on people with poor vision. One of the best reasons to go with Wordpress.com rather than Blogger is the Akismet anti-spam system, which relies on the collective power of its millions of users marking things as spam. I use it on my self-hosted Wordpress blog, too, and since installing it some 15 months ago, it has blocked a quarter of a million spam comments at Via Negativa. Without it, I probably wouldn't be able to allow commenting at all.
Thanks all.
I have to say I hadn't been to Nea's before, but went over to see what Avus was talking about, and it really is weird, I've never seen the like. That Avus said at one point all the addresses were porn sites seems to me to indicate that it was something malevolent.
I've not been bothered by spam here really (- and touchwood I'm still remarkably even with e-mail, my spamkiller gets so bored with having nothing to do it sometimes snatches perfectly kosher messages from people I want to see just to give itself some purpose in life, or it gets very officious, such as when Joe was trying to mis-spell the word 'blog' in as many ways as possible just to amuse himself or show what a silly word it is, and the Spamkiller decided that was out of order).
Occasionally I get some silly turned out thing with a link in it in the comments. The fact that Nea's was blocking her actual blog was alarming.
Dave, a quarter of a million is scary.
That is weird. I had no chance to read anything at Nea's.
I dont seem to have a problem, but having said that...
Wow! i had no idea that spam could go so far...maybe it is, as suggested, another evil takeover of some kind. i've received spam comments before, but they stopped showing up once i set it up so that people had to leave an email address. Even so, i've just changed my settings for my blog. Typepad gives the option of typing in a code (yes, it is sometimes difficult to read) or it lets the blogger chose to authorize comments before they appear on the blog.
xipex, this time is what I have to type in order to reach you. A relatively easy one. I can't always decipher the letters. But I don't blame you. I had a bout of spammers once, which quite upset an old friend of mine. He gave up reading my posts as a result, assuming quite wrongly that I was involved with pornbrokers.
Bokviw! I really don't mind typing a wordver to comment on sites if it keeps the vermin away. Even if I fatfinger it 3 or 4 times. ;-)
Nice site.... I would hate to lose my blog, I'm just getting started.
Thanks again,
Z - the Typepad procedure is rather laborious if you have verification too, as Lee suggested.
Plutarch - that is a very sad story! How horrid! Xipex sounds like a Greek comic book character!
Robin - Bokviw is a good one too!
Autumnmoon - welcome, very nice to meet you !
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