I sometimes give Conman a hard time because his journal, The Boston Diaries, has no discussion or commenting system. On the other hand I can’t really give him too much shit–Conman did write his journal software himself (he calls it Mod_Blog), and I ganked my journal’s software from WordPress, mostly because I’m not talented enough to write my own like Conman did.
One thing that Conman doesn’t ever have to worry about, because he doesn’t have any kind of commenting system, is Blog Spam. If you allow comments to be added to your journal, then robots can come along and post advertisements in your comments section. I’m not sure anybody ever buys anything after seeing a Blog Spam post, but they sure are obnoxious–especially when you have to go in and delete them.
I haven’t got enough regular readers to make all of them sign up for an account just so they can comment (although I could, if I wanted to). But then the bots would just sign up for accounts and then Spam anyway.
So I came up with a happy compromise.
WordPress has a plug-in for a pretty effective bot-deterrent called reCAPTCHA (CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Touring test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”), which lets me add a CAPTCHA challenge to the bottom of my comment form, like so:
So of you’re a human, feel free to comment to your heart’s content. If you’re a nasty Blog Spam bot, you can go pound sand, fucker.
EDIT: it should be noted that if you register for an account on The Corsair Journal, then you don’t have to answer a CAPTCHA challenge whenever you comment (but you do have to answer one to get an account. So there).
September 11th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Oh neat! If you do register, you don’t need to type in the CAPTCHA.
Now, the reason for the blog spam is not to get people interested in a product and buy from a link placed in some random blog, but to increase the Google Page Rank of the target website by linking to it from all over the place. And by increasing the Page Rank, that site rises in the results page.
But I’ve had to deal with spammers on another site of mine, http://www.hhgproject.org/ on the contact page. Not only did I have to add a CAPTCHA, but a hidden field that shouldn’t be changed at all, in order to cut down on the spam.
At first, I didn’t have comments because I didn’t know how to address (litterally, as in URL) comments. Then there’s the whole flat vs. threaded controversy. I took so long in thinking about it that comment spam became a problem, and that (along with having to write a bunch of code to filter the comments to prevent cross site scripting attacks) pretty much killed any idea of comments on my site.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Capcha also being a way to find out if your LDR lover is for reals:
http://xkcd.com/632/
September 12th, 2009 at 12:04 am
@Spring: Tee hee! That’s cute!