Lately, I’ve been getting more spam comments on this site. At first, it was the irritating “weight loss” ones that appeared every other day. In the past couple of days, the number of spam posts has increased dramatically, and the content has been extremely tasteless.
Rather than host links to objectionable (and dangerous) sites, even for a matter of minutes, I’ve chosen to increase the security about comments left for posts. Going forward, when you leave a comment, it will not appear until I have expressly approved it. I will try to check back as often as I can. I’m sorry–that’s not what I wanted for this site. I enjoy your comments and hope that the new policy won’t deter anyone from leaving a kind word. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world…
Yet.
#1 by Adam on July 29th, 2009
Is captcha or something similar not an option here? That is a bit of a shame really. I know that I had recieved Spam comments on a prior blog and the captcha pretty much took care of it.
#2 by Tom on July 29th, 2009
…And this is just the kind of lecherous and dispic–oh, wait, I know this guy. Never mind.
I’m sure that there is. I’m still getting to know the power that is WordPress. The stabs I’ve taken at installing plugs have met with mixed success. I’ll probably need to dig into the PHP code, which will involve learning PHP. (And, to the uninitiated, that isn’t an illegal substance. It’s the programming language driving this site.)
So, captchas are an option. We’ll see what happens.
#3 by Rollin Nordell on August 6th, 2009
You know what – those first 7 birthdays DID have an eternal impact – because of who Ian was, because of who his parents were, he had an eternal vision and we got to work in it – helping provide food for starving children who Jesus loves!
#4 by Eric M. Larson on August 7th, 2009
On the commenting note, check out a plug-in called “reCAPTCHA”; I tried installing it on a blog of mine and SPAM dropped -way- down. Not to zero, but pretty close.
You’ve all seen this one before, where you’re presented two words to type. The interesting thing is that it’s part of a system to improve the recognition of old scanned books. When you’re shown two words, one word is known, and other one couldn’t be made out by the computer. When enough humans type in their interpretation of the difficult-to-figure-out word, then the scanned document becomes that much better.
Something like that; it makes sense in my brain but it’s hard to explain, especially at this hour.
Point being, the WordPress plug-in side of it is easy.