WordPress, the program I use to write this blog, has an excellent spam filter called Akismet. And it’s a good thing, as the spambots attempt to post hundreds of messages to this blog each week. The problem is that occasionally there are false positives and a legitimate message gets banished to the ether. While Akismet saves all the tagged-as-spam comments, allowing me to review and de-spam them, it’s a royal pain in the neck to wade through the muck every few days searching (hoping?) for that one legitimate post.
So, I’ve installed one o’ them CAPTCHA thingies. That’s the doohickey where you have to type in a random word before your comment is submitted. I know that some poeple find them to be a pain in the arse, but I’ve tried to minimize the pain by choosing a “fun” set of possible words.
The one really annoying thing about this change is that if you enter the word incorrectly, you will probably lose your post and will have to retype the whole thing. I’m working on figuring out a way to fix that.
Wow, too funny. Yah, I understand your spam bane oh too well. Stopping this crap is my business, that’s how your blog popped up on my radar! There are hundreds of posts just like yours crankin on just how much of a waste of time spam is – and they’re all right on the money!
I thought I would write fast before your Captcha thing started to overwhelm. Yes, there are thousands of spammers that sit and solve Captcha’s just get their links posted. Mostly because they are paid to. Yup, there are site out their that hire people to post. I give you link here but that would just boost their Search Engine Ranking, and that’s the last thing we want to do. I must delete about 40 or 50 per day that have solved a captcha trying to get listed in our corporate forum. (But, there is real solution coming, that’s what my blog http://www.respect101.com is all about.
Well, the funny thing (at least for me) is that when I first look at a site a get that – separated by the globe feeling – then, the first link I click on in your blog references a story about you in the Boston Globe! No way! You’re right down the street, relatively speaking, from Marlboro. I was in Boston last night in fact right on Huntington Ave.
Where can I get a hint on where you perform? Maybe I’ll drop in and say hello!
Cheers for now!
Well, the CAPTCHA thingie proved to be pretty useless. Not because anyone “solved it”, but because nearly all the spam I was getting was trackback spam, against which the CAPTCHA was useless. I’ve since done some more research and I think I’ve got a winning Anti-Spam Cocktail. I’ll post about it in more detail after I’ve done some more testing and I’m more convinced that it’s working effectively.
To answer your last question Frank, subscribe to this blog! I don’t post very often, but upcoming gigs definitely show up.