As of today, I have received 23 spam comments since I turned off the word verification on November 27th.
I switched the email in which I receive my comments to another one (Hotmail), which is better for handling spam, and all I have to do is click the box, hit "this is spam" and they go away - plus that particular group is banned from that email address, so they cannot show up again, unless they change their id's.
It seems to me to be a better way of staving off the spam comments than applying word verification, which is clumsy at best and infuriating at worst.
Are you brave enough to try it?
Baby, baby! You're talking my language, Judy. I hate that word verification scheme soooooooooooooo much!
ReplyDeleteI've seen a number based one on a few English sites that I like a lot better and Tanya (Netchick) had a nice one where you just uncheck a box. Those aren't bad--but the one on Blogger is just too damn hard to read at times. Damn them!
Wheeee. I just ranted! :-) Thanks for the opp, Judy.
I came here at the behest of Michele this time--but as you know, I drop by almost everyday.
Better yet, is there something we can do to eliminate spammers????
ReplyDeleteBesides killing them, that is.....
ReplyDeleteWhat I did to eradicate the dreaded spammers was go into my profile settings and remove my blog link. I relinked it as a web link on the left side bar of the profile page. I haven't had a spammer since.
ReplyDeleteIn a word Judy, NO soory you've got to go through WV to comment on my site until I'm convinced of a better alternative.
ReplyDeleteYour fix eliminates the emails...but what do you do with the comments?
ReplyDeleteIf you no longer receive the emails, you don't know how many spam comments you're getting on old entries, which is how spammers usually work: they hit old entries so bloggers don't notice & delete those comments. If the comments remain, the spammers get increased Google rankings for their sites because those "links" make them look like their sites are highly trafficked.
In other words, the point of comment spam isn't to flood your email box...it's to riddle your blog with links to spam sites. So as I understand it, your solution eliminates the email, but it doesn't eliminate the comments themselves, which is exactly what the spammers are going for.
Or am I missing something? :-)
I think lorianne is right. I've had spam sent to such old entries that I CAN'T FIND THEM. It's incredibly irritating - I can't get rid of them without going through my entire blog on a spam hunt. I do not want spam on my blog. The email comments at least let me know they're there, somewhere. (There is one still there, actually. I still haven't found it.)
ReplyDeleteThat is why comment verification is staying on, on my blog, at least for now. Even though it annoys me enormously every time I use it, and probably discourages real commenters. It's still better than having my blog littered with spam.
Knock on wood, but I don't get spam. Wonder why that is?
ReplyDeleteTo answer Hoss....you don't get spam because you have Haloscan to do your comments.
ReplyDeleteI added Haloscan to mine to be able to have the trackback system but the absence of spam is an added bonus.
Haloscan really is best for comments. I don't get any spam via that program and it's easy to install in blogger, plus you can ban IPs and edit comments etc. The only problem is after awhile the comments in your archives are only shown on the haloscan page, but then again do you really need to read those? Probably not.
ReplyDeleteI have just turned off WV cos its ****ed. I'm going to see how it goes. I've got an email account that will dump spam & as blog admin I can bin it, but I don't really want to wade through it all again! I'll give it a week:-)
ReplyDeleteMichele sent me today
Word verification is indeed knackered this evening, so I have trned it off...we shall see how it goes..
ReplyDeleteMichele sent me
Quick note to EVERYONE commenting here: the ultimate solution is now posted to the top of Michele Agnew's blog. Here's what I said...I hope you all try it on your respective Blogger sites:
ReplyDeleteADVICE TO ALL USERS OF BLOGGER ACCOUNTS:
STEP 1 - Turn OFF Word Verification
STEP 2 - Activate Comment Moderation
This addresses all the issues that have been discussed online today. It also makes life easier for your visitors - AND allows you to keep the nasty comment spammers from your blog.
Carmi again...hope this helps. Thanks, Judy, for giving this important issue the attention it deserves.
Yesterday, I got the worst kind of spam. I was told that I won 1.2 million dollars. I could collect this money by giving my personal information to a person who supposedly worked in a Nigerian bank. It was obvious to me that this was a scam, so I did some research on Google and found a watchgroup that was looking for any emails received by these fraudelent frauders (I know that's not a word, but it works, right?).
ReplyDeleteSo, I played along with the game and made up a false identity and sent it to them. I used my local police department instead of my home phone number.
Long story short, I ultimately asked the person to send all future emails to my other email address, which was the watchdog's address.
This 'lottery scam' was so ridiculous because the Nigerian bank's email address was a Yahoo.com address. Anyway, spammers stink!