To all my bloggie friends who use Blogger, please go and read Spam-O-Phobia on Doc's blog and then get rid of those damn word verification checks on comments. Follow his link for instructions if you can't work out yourself how to do it.
Those annoying captchas are not necessary.
You won't get overwhelmed in spam if you turn them off. I have proved it to my own satisfaction over the last few weeks.
I can't read the damn things and often have to type them several times before the evil captcha checkers in Mountain View understand me.
If you don't turn them off (or persuade me that I am wrong about this) I will stop commenting on your blog.
No, wait. You might want me to stop commenting.
Whatever.
Please do it.
PS. It would be nice if bloggers on other platforms turned them off too, but I don't know whether your other spam protection tools are as good as Google's. Also, the illegibility of the Blogger captchas seems to be an order of magnitude worse than what I see on most other blogging platforms.
14 comments:
I'll give it a try.
Thanks Jos. One or two spam comments have slipped through in the last few weeks since I turned off captchas, but then I always got a few when captchas were turned on!
Very short, this try.
I've turned moderation on again.
(I never had captchas)
I have to be able to control when comments on my Winter Challenge are posted. Otherwise answers are already visible for the other competitors.
I'll give it a new try when this series is finished.
OK. As Doc says, moderation can be annoying too as it takes the spontaneity out of commenting - but I can understand why you need it Jos for your Winter Challenges.
I have moderation in effect for posts older than 10 days. With over 2,000 old posts out there I suspect that I might get quite a lot of spam accumulating on old posts over time without having the extra protection of moderation. And hardly anyone leaves any real comments on those old posts. And even if they do, the "spontaneity" argument doesn't really apply to someone leaving a comment on a post 5 years after it was written!
I also turned off the Captchas from hell a few days after they switched to the illegible ones and have found the same thing. Almost all spam now goes straight to the spam folder. I think they may have improved their spam catcher at the same time, as less seems to make it through than before.
But what bugs me almost as much as the illogical illegibles is the fact that they eliminated the little checkbox that allowed you to follow a comments thread via e-mail notifications.
I think this has taken some of the spontaneity out of comments threads on blogs I follow.
Does anyone know of another way to do that?
I see that the ability to subscribe to comments by email is still there on some blogs. Baydog's has it for example. I think it must be to do with what format you choose for comments. If there is no other solution we may all have to go over to the one Baydog is using.
Yes. That's the secret. If you go to Settings: Comments: and choose "embedded below post" under Comment Form Placement (as I just did) you will give your readers an opportunity to "Subscribe by email".
Good find.
I see you can also subscribe even if you haven't left a comment.
And the preview works, too (for those of us who are anal enough to want to check a comment before we post it). They'd managed to goof up the previews in the old form, too.
Does this mean I don't have to drink a pint of bourbon anymore? (The squiggly lines only made sense to me after a few good stiff drinks.)
A few, Joe? A pint only makes two drinks.
Yes! Yes! We, the blogging people have nothing to lose but chains and chains of captchas! We can be free at last!
I did this as you suggested and I get about 3 spam comments per day on each of my blogs. They are filtered out, however, by blogger and if I go to Dashboard, click "comments" and then "spam", I can seem what's been filtered and decide to keep any which are not really spam. For now it is worth it for my readers not to have to deal with the bloody captchas. Thanks.
That's right Panda. I get 20-30 spam comments a week going into my spam folder now, but it only takes a minute to review them to see if any aren't spam (very rarely so) and then delete them all. It really is worth it.
Better late than never ... we're captcha free. I always hated those things anyway.
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