-
3
DEC
2008Browser CAPTCHA
I'm sure everyone has noticed that my blog posting has dramatically fallen off from the rate I was getting articles out. Unfortunately, I've been spending my blog time fighting the endless war against spam. I've made some progress there and thought I would share some details that others might find useful.
As I've covered previously this blog now requires me to approve all comments. I'm super happy with this decision. I approve posts promptly, so there's pretty much no downside for users and this means you have not seen a single spam message on this site since I made the change. This was literally the perfect solution… on the viewer's side of the fence.
What it didn't fix was the hassle on my side. I don't mind approving messages at all, as long as I have a reasonable pile to go through. However, the spammers really ramped up their efforts against me lately and this blog received 11,134 comment posts in the month of November alone. Six of those were legitimate comments. That exceeds my definition of reasonable.
-
18
MAR
2008Death and Spam
The popular expression warns us that death and taxes are the only two certainties, but I'm worried we may need to add spam to the list. Publish any material that draws readership on the Web and invites reader feedback and you can be certain sure you will be swimming in spam soon enough.
One of the biggest reasons I switched to my own blogging engine was to fine tune my spam control strategy. Until today, the system was that I received an email anytime a comment was posted to this blog and it was a single keystroke to remove any offensive content. While that was as simple as I can think to make a process, the fact was that it still wasn't good enough.
The spammers ramped up their efforts until I was facing about 50 useless posts every 12 hours. While I didn't mind clearing them, the fact was that visitors were probably seeing spam due to the regularity of the postings and the time between the post and my clearing it. Obviously, there was at least spam on the blog while I slept each night.
