Comment spam is not only a nuisance. It is also costly for business to have to deal with.
But there is an effective solution which is not only free (that magic word), it’s also easy to set up. And ‘easy’ is, of course, the other magic word that we all love so much.
This works for WordPress blogs - which are easy to set up if you use Fantastico (it’s built into CPanel webhosting).
Today’s solution to comment spam relies on reCAPTCHA which is a free WP plugin. And as I mentioned, it is so easy to install.
Step 1. You download it from recaptcha.net and unzip the file.
2. You upload the two .php files to your Wordpress plugins folder.
3. Then you go to your Plugins page and activate reCAPTCHA by clicking it. The new page reminds you to enter the 2 big long numbers you got when you registered at recaptcha.net (called public and private keys and they are unique to this one site of yours). That’s it. You’re all set.
WHY I LIKE reCAPTCHA
- It’s free.
- It works.
- There is no messing around with copying code into your blog template.
- No permissions to change. (CHMOD isnt hard once you know what you’re doing but the learning curve before that has befuddled many a beginner, I’d say.)
- A feel-good bonus is the fact that you’re helping the Internet Archive to improve the accuracy of its Optical Character Recognition software.
How so? Because the words shown come directly from old books that are being digitized. Words that the OCR software cannot read are fed into captchas and if multiple users like you and me all render it the same way then that result is entered into the OCR memory.
So not only do your blogs gain protection against robot comment spam, your commenters are helping old books get digitized correctly.
Are you using captchas to protect your blog from comment spam yet? It’s free and it’s easy. What are you waiting for?
By the way, CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, although ironically the recaptcha.net site does not include the word Public in its explanation of the term. So.. would that make it a CATCHA? - without the P.
Just kidding!
RESOURCES:
Secret Article Profits - http://www.squidoo.com/Secret_Article_Profits
How To Find Hot Niche Markets - http://www.FindHotMarkets.com
Article by Gary Harvey of GaryHarvey.net.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gary_Harvey
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2 Comments
I’ve been using Akismet lately which seems to do a good job.
The reCAPTCHA text here is OK but some CAPTCHA is so difficult to read that it floors me sometimes. The point there is that you enable comments to get interaction from readers and a difficult prevents interaction! Hmmm!
Alex, I actually use both Akismet and reCaptcha. Certainly agree with you that Akismet is good protection, even on its own.
You’ll see that on this blog I am using a different anti-spam post plugin. reCaptcha has 2 words - this has only one. W
Why? Just trying different things. Both work.
Gary
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