New Anti-Spam System (maybe)

I’ve activated it. If it works, spam comments will be blocked while comments flagged as possible spam will require commenters to perform a “copy the image” action to prove they aren’t spambots. This should be an improvement over the current system, which puts all suspicious-but-legitimate comments into the general spam queue where they are almost impossible for me to find. Please email me at the support address if you have problems. I need your feedback to determine if this system works as advertised, so please try to leave comments on this post and let me know if your comment either disappears or you get prompted to copy an image before your comment posts. Thanks.

17 thoughts on “New Anti-Spam System (maybe)”

  1. Unclear. I still can’t tell if the CAPTCHA (image verification) system works. But at least this system automatically whitelists commenters whose comments are rescued from the spam queue, so that nobody should have more than one comment erroneously flagged as spam.

    If this new system proves inadequate we can always go to a simple CAPTCHA system or, as a last resort, require commenters to register.

  2. Thanks, Dan. Very helpful.

    BTW, Akismet is the system that we were using. It worked great for a long time, but recently the level of false positives became intolerable, and there is no way for a user to change the settings.

  3. I think Google should offer a filtering service for blog comments. The cost might be that readers would see Google ads in valid comments. Given Google’s good record of handling spam in their email system, any anti-spam system they developed for blog comments would have a good shot at being popular.

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