Alright, I need help from my fellow Blogger users here. I used to have my comments set up so potential commenter-leavers ran into the captcha thingy. Which was great for spam-catching, but not so good considering that I had more than one follower tell me that they didn’t/couldn’t leave comments specifically because the captchas were damn near impossible to read.
So, I switched over to manually approving every comment. Which is completely fine, but I’ve now been receiving an ABSURD amount of spam comments that I need to flag as such. I’m talking anywhere from 2 to a dozen daily. They are all the same – from “annonymous” and starting off with a paragraph about how great my blog is, followed by “visit my website: {insert spammy site here}”
It’s just frustrating – I certainly don’t mind fielding comments from my actual readers, but I’m getting quite tired of my email pinging all the time with fake comments.
Any thoughts or suggestions from you all? The main reason I blog is for reader conversation, so it’s a bit sad that it seems I can either spend all day flagging spam comments or make it impossible for my readers to comment in the first place.
Thoughts/suggestions/ideas? I definitely want to make it friendly for everyone, not just Google/Blogger users… I’m at a loss!
Hmm. I think, I could be wrong, that I have both enabled, the captcha thing and email approval. I haven't heard any complaints about the captchas. I also disabled my blog to be found via a search engine for a while. Maybe this helped because I very rarely get spam comments. I did a few times, but not enough over the years to concern me. Maybe I'd get more commenters though if I left it open. Then again, I've opened several accounts just to be able to comment on other blogs, so I feel that if people want to comment badly enough, they will open an account. Maybe I've just been lucky….?
Crap, speaking of comments, I accidentally deleted Jamie's comment – here it is!
I don't mind the captcha thing so much and it does prevent spam comments pretty well. I've heard Disqus works pretty well
Jamie
greyskysaturday.wordpress.com
Yes, I know you have both enabled, as I have to fill out the captcha then I get the "your comment will be visible after approval" message.
Maybe I'll just turn my captchas back on and see how it goes!
Hmmm, maybe I'll turn my captchas back on then – this whole anonymous comments thing is annoying!
Turn Captcha back on again. Oddly we don't have it turned on over at Philofaxy, and we don't get too much spam.
But what we do have enabled is manual moderation of comments of posts more than 14 days old. Most spam comments appear on the old posts not the recent ones.
If people find Captcha difficult they should use the recycle symbol to cycle through to another choice generally I find this ok.
Also turn off anonymous commenting make everyone log in to something.
Steve
I think you hit it right on the head, Steve! All of my spam is from anonymous commenters on posts that are older!
Before I do the captchas, I think I'll remove anonymous comments and see if that helps – thanks!
Same thing happened to me. I had to turn the Captcha back on! I tried tagging those comments as Spam, but then it seemed to make it worse and I had even more Spam!
I hate those captcha things as I really struggle to read them, and I confess it does put me off commenting quite a lot, but better that than you being buried under a mountain of spam. What a pity though!
Actually, so far I just blocked anonymous commenters, and it seems to be working! Time will tell…
It looks like I may not have to turn the captcha back on – I blocked anonymous comments and it seems to be working so far! Fingers crossed!