3694 Comment verification

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

If you owe me money, every unnecessary thing you buy

from the time I lent you money to the time you pay me back, is mine.

If you don't have money to pay me, you don't have money for that.

--  Hellhathnofury  --

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The "verification words" provided by Blogger are getting more and more difficult.  Too often the numbers portion is a blur, and/or the letters run together and overlap, so you can't figure them out - "rn" often looks like "m", for example,or "ob" looks like "do".

There are several ways to avoid robot spam comments.

1. Don't allow comments at all.
2. Let all comments be immediately posted, and then delete the spam. 
3. Monitor comments.  The blog owner gets the comment by email and has to approve it before it is appended to the post.
4. Require that the commenter pass a word verification test, and then the comment is immediately posted.
5. Require both word verification and moderation.

#1, block all comments, is ok if you don't care what anyone else thinks.

I tried #2, allow everyone, for a while, back when Blogger started the current generation of ugly word verification.  It was ok for a few days, then the spammers found me, and I was getting a dozen spam comments a day.  (You know when you get spam because Blogger sends the comment in an email, but having to go to the blog a dozen times a day to delete them is a pain.)  I had to go back to word verification.

#3, moderate all comments, is no fun because people reading the blog don't get to see their comment until the blog owner gets around to accepting the comment.  Worse, they don't get to see the comments of others until later.  Robot spammers can get comments through to the moderation approval stage, so the need to refuse those comments, sometimes dozens a day, can be annoying to the blog owner.

#4, word verification, is the method I've been using because the comment gets posted immediately once the commenter passes the verification test, and commenters also see the comments of others.  Since the comments are "real time", they can even have conversations.   However, a lot of people have great difficulty with that.  HINT:  Anyone having a problem with the word verification, don't attempt to guess if you aren't sure.  That way lies frustration and wasted time doing it over and over.  Instead, next to the rectangle where you type in the numbers and letters, to the right of that rectangle, you'll see a circular arrow.  Click on that circular arrow, and the verification will change.  You can keep clicking and asking for another until you find one that's easy to read.

I flat out hate #5, requiring both word verification and moderation.  It has the same problems as both #3 and #4, especially if the blog owner takes a while to get around to moderation.  Requiring both is needless and painful overkill.  I mostly avoid commenting on those blogs.

Sooooo, that's why I use word verification.  It's the best of bad choices.
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