spam, spam, spam
It has been a bad day for spam. In one day, the first of my formerly pristine 200ok emails started receiving spam (I feel so violated, it was never even publically posted); then this weblog got a sudden influx of comment spam.
My options with blogger are to moderate all comments or enable the CAPTCHA. I've gone with the CAPTCHA as the lesser of two evils (it has an audio alternative so it's not too bad - not perfect, but not too bad).
Occasionally I wonder how the net survives under the extraordinary weight of spam that clogs it at every opportunity. If we got 15 telemarketing calls every day, we'd unplug the phone. Why do we endure email spam?
How do we keep in touch with friends when we have to abandon email addresses due to spam? How do we do business when our email gateways are being hammered by spam? How do we have meaningful comment threads when we have to put in CAPTCHAs just to filter out the morons trying to sell stupid stuff?
Does everyone just get used to wading through spam? I guess I was lucky. I had a year off after getting my own domain. It was awesome. I guess the honeymoon is over.
Not directly helpful to you, but I have a WordPress blog and use two plugins side-by-side: Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2. Before I installed them I was constantly moderating spam comments. Afterwards all I get is the occasional digest telling me that suspected spams are being held. No false positives have made it through and I'm not aware of any false negatives (but that's harder to tell of course — no complaints of though). E-mail on the other hand is a losing battle. I guess I just got used to scanning the Junk folder and deleting on a pretty regular basis.
To be honest I think a lot of packages like Wordpress have better comment systems than Blogger, spam handling included. Blogger's comment system is a tad unfriendly.
Still, the CAPTCHA seems to have stopped automated comment spam on the blogs where I've enabled it, so it's not all bad ;)
Frankly speaking, this spam is freaking me out sometime! Nice captcha, btw!
Right. So either the comment spam AI is getting better, or someone has a very repetitive job! ;)
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