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Sunday, July 07, 2013

To CAPTCHA or not to CAPTCHA?

"Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart".  We all hate them:

"What do you mean I'm not helping?"
 
 But they do work... sometimes a little too well.  A few times I've actually given up on trying to post comments on blogger because of a series of near-impossible captchas.

Anyway, I've had to thin out a bunch of spam comments from older posts on this blog recently, and while that was totes fun, bro, I'm wondering if I should give in and put authentication on my commenting the way most other blogs seem to.

What do you, my regular readers, think? 

6 comments:

  1. I tend to skip commenting on blogs that have captchas on. Most of the time I can't read those damn things!

    Besides I'll make exceptions if the topic deseveres that nasty annoyance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Turn on 'Registered Users' to comment rather than turn on captcha I get the occasional spam comment once in a blue moon.

    Its under Settings, Posts and Comments, Who Can Comment?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks. I'm inclined to avoid "registered users only", for reasons stated well here. I don't get a lot of random (human) commenters passing by, but if I do I'd like to make it as easy as possible for them to say something.

      I've just enabled comment moderation for posts > 2 wks old, that might help with spam showing up on my old posts.

      Delete
    2. To be honest most people who comment on my blog are my followers which are registered users anyway. Besides theres is host of different accounts tied into blogger. Google+ for instance. Its your choice obviously :) but I've never had a problem with it.

      Delete
  3. I hate having to put the captchas in, since it seems it always takes a couple of tries for me. Maybe i'm more robot than human? I don't have it on my blog and haven't had any spam in recent memory.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Like I said, I have had frustrating experiences... but ultimately I decided against CAPTCHAs here. Instead, first-time commenters are moderated.

      Delete

Thanks for commenting!