Blog advice

[nightdreamer]

I'm setting up a new SFF blog and was wondering what the consensus was about anti-spam measures. Which do you find the LEAST annoying?

[Gary Compton]

Neither but I'm a garybot

[hopewrites]

captcha break dyslexic brain. and if one has to register to post on someone's blog one is less likely to become a spammy one post wonder.

[Bowler1]

A log in only takes a second and if the site is good, post away with lots of posts.

Anyway, I'd have great difficulty proving to the world I'm human once, if I had to do it all the time I'd blow my cover!

[Overread]

If its just a blog stick to captchas if you want comments. I, and many others, are unlikely to go through the whole process of registration just to post a comment and the process of registration itself does not stop spammers anyway - the captcha will be doing that as part of the sign-up process.

Anything that gets past the captcha is likely a manual registration to spam and these are common enough that registration forms won't stop them.



So keep is simple short and fast. If the site is made of forums and other membership features then yes signups are not a bad approach; but just for blog comments its overkill.

[Jennifer Cthulus]

The best approach that I've tried is to simply add "http" to my comments blacklist. Legitimate users who simply want to comment usually don't post links, and don't tend to include "http" in them when they do, so that filter blacklists any spammer who stops by.

Also, updating your blog regularly will help enormously. I've noticed in the past that abandoned blogs tend to be the biggest spam magnets. Registering the domain for multiple years might also help; spammers seem to start showing up heavily when there's only about a month left on the registration.

[nightdreamer]

Well, not a big sample, and not a strong consensus at that. But thanks anyway. I went largely from I own experience. I've often decided that registration wasn't worth it just to post a single comment and so forgotten about it. On the other hand, I hate captchas because a lot of the time, I can't read them either. I think I have it right, but don't, and have to keep trying over and over until I get one. I ended up using a math test. What's 7+11? I can do those. The blog is here: http://duane.duane-n-lisa.net. Nothing fancy. Just Wordpress with a popular theme, a few plug-ins, and a public domain NASA picture of Saturn.

[James Coote]

I disabled comments on my blog recently. There were so few genuine ones, it was just a pain working my way through all the spam.

I tried facebook logins, but spam bots can just sign up for a facebook account anyway. There are other plugins you can get to let people log in with a single ID (e.g. gravatar), but I reckon if you're aiming to build a community, you'll eventually need a forum anyway, and that is easier to manage

[thaddeus6th]

Hmm. Not sure. I'd probably go for the login. Quite often I just fail at captchas. I'm not dyslexic (ironically I almost spelled that wrong just now) but I find it very easy to get certain letters wrong because they're necessarily distorted.

[Anne Lyle]

I use an non-captcha anti-bot plugin, backed up by Akismet to catch any intelligent bots. The plugin is of the sort that asks a very simple question, so it doesn't discriminate against dyslexia or other reading problems.