Recaptcha Deployed Here 5
The last few years I’ve been manually fighting blog spam here. Usually it isn’t all that bad, but recently it became significant, hundreds of messages a day. Since that happened, I’ve been looking for a simple and built-in way to address the blog spam issue. I don’t know when it happened, but the blog software added recaptcha support. I’ve had a key for that service some time now … Nov 2009 … but have just deployed it today. It seems to be working, but obviously having a 3rd party able to track all pages viewed here is less than ideal. I’m sorry.
Anyway, if it works well this week, I’ll probably enable live comment posts.
Help me test this solution over the next few weeks by posting on-topic comments please.
I just thought I would comment to check out the recaptcha feature.
Seems standard.
So far ZERO spam has come through, so the recaptch seems to be working. If it lasts through the weekend, immediate posting will be enabled.
However, the preview facility seems to have broken. This happened before the reCaptcha was implemented, so I do not think it is related.
I had tried to post a second comment right after the first one, but the recaptcha did’t change and it kept giving me an error when I tried to post. There might be some issues, but at least initial tries works.
Ok, comments will be posted immediately now. I’ve disabled moderation based on the complete, 100% lack, of spam comments since enabling the reCaptcha support.
I hope moderation is not necessary in the future. If so, it will be enabled again.
No solution found to get Preview working, sorry.
The last week or so there hasn’t been any, zero, blog spam. It has been good, until this morning.
The reCaptcha seemed to be working, until …. imagine my surprise to see some spam comments in the task queue this morning. They were flagged as spam and were not posted on the public site, so the captcha appears to still be working.
I just looked into how those comments were posted. They provided a recaptcha response. I can’t tell if the answer was correct or not, just that 2 spams were in the queue and 1 other was rejected and never made it into the queue. Of course, there were many, many, many completely rejected attempts that did not include any recaptcha information at all. The way that spam and non-spam comments are determined is interesting. I don’t immediately see any parameter differences between valid comments and spam comments that recaptcha accepts. Hummm.
So far, there hasn’t been any blog spam that got posted, so I guess I’ll leave the settings as-is today.