Verification, moderation or spam, aka, the crazy word thing

A few of you fabulous readers have asked me why you no longer have to type in that crazy, impossible nonsense word before you can leave a comment. I actually was going to write this post when I removed it, but I thought, “Oh, no one really cares about that!”

But it turns out you DO care!

Here’s the deal:

A lot of blogs won’t allow people to leave “Anonymous” comments. One reason is that it allows people to say mean things without signing their name. I happen to love my anonymous commenters and haven’t had that problem (yet).

The other reason is that it allows spam in the comments, just like you get spam in e-mail. On Blogger, you have three choices to keep out spam:

Word verification:

Allow Anonymous comments, but prevent spam by requiring people to do the word verification. The downside is, many people dislike typing in the crazy words so much that they won’t leave a comment at all if they have to do that.

Comment moderation:

Bloggers can remove the word verification, but approve all of the comments before they are published. This allows the blog author to delete spam before it is published. But the downside is that commenters have to wait to see if their comment was approved and published, and the blogger has to constantly check for comments.

No Anonymous comments:

Blocking Anonymous comments would keep out the spam and wouldn’t require the word verification. But then all of my nice Anonymous commenters would have to go through the extra step of creating a Blogger account, which can be a pain, too.

Nothing:

So, I decided to go with none of the above. I’ve just been deleting the spam when it comes through (after it’s published). So, if you see an ad for something weird in my comments, just ignore it. It’s the price we all have to pay to avoid typing in those annoying letters!

If the spam gets out of control, I’ll have to go back to either word verification or asking everyone to register on Blogger. I hope this will work though!

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Did I miss something? If you are a blogger, what do you think about word verification vs. comment moderation?

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