Saturday, January 26, 2013

Sorry, Commenters, It's Back To Proving Your Humanity, I'm Afraid.

Well, that lasted, what, five days? But the spammers have found me, and I'm now getting multiple spam blog comments per hour, some of which Blogger's spam filter catches and some of which it doesn't, but all of which I have to check on. Needless to say, this has crossed the annoyance threshold very quickly, so the CAPTCHA is back on. My apologies for those who have trouble with it. Of course, family and friends can always e-mail me if they have something they want to say but can't or don't want to post here.

14 comments:

  1. Most of the time, I make lucky guesses. (Seriously, that last one didn't even look like a number, let alone the zero I entered and which magically was right.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sigh. That thing really is incredibly annoying. Sadly, though, the spam is even more annoying. Well, at least it'll give you multiple attempts.

      Delete
  2. How long as this been a thing on blogspot? (I stick to lj and DW, so I honestly don't know.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The CAPTCHA? I dunno, several years, I think. But I also think it's gotten harder and harder to do, as computers have gotten better and better at doing it. I'm starting to think, there's got to be a better way, but damned if I know what it is.

      Delete
    2. One forum I use requires one to provide the answer to a randomly chosen very simple sum, such as 1000 + 4. That seems to work well.

      Delete
    3. Computers being as good as they are at math, though, if that one ever became common enough to bother with, it'd doubtless be really easy to program a bot to break it.

      Delete
  3. I think I can handle it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yay! Also, I am reassured to know that you're not some kind of android. :)

      Delete
    2. But I thought you liked androids! :)

      (I wish all forums would agree on whether one should use angle brackets or square brackets for italic codes and the like. I can never remember which forum uses which, and almost always seem to guess wrong the first time!)

      Delete
    3. I love androids, when they're not spamming me. But it would be disconcerting to discover my dad is one. :)

      Blogger, for the record -- although you seem to have figured it out here -- does not use the square bracket forum codes, but only accepts actual HTML coding.

      Of course when it doubt, you can always go old-school and emphasize things with asterisks. :)

      Delete
  4. I have to say, I've never liked the CAPTCHA at this site -- I've actually posted about it in the past. But if it's between that and your being flooded with spam...well, okay, I'll suffer.

    ReplyDelete
  5. But wow are those captchas bad even by captcha standards! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sigh. I really wish there were some third option, like I could give it a list of people to accept or something. I see that there is an option to limit it to people with registered accounts... Maybe I'll try that. It might at least make life easier for some folks, although whether it will also make life easier for the spammers is an open question.

      Delete
  6. And, whoops, no, that won't work, that just limits who can comment to registered users. Looks like the CAPTCHA option is strictly binary: off or on. SIGH.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.