If you never comment on this blog, you can probably skip this post and use your valuable time in more rewarding ways.
A week ago or so I changed the settings on The RV Sabbatical Journal to allow readers to comment freely on my posts without having to deal with "word verification" or "comment moderation". For the uninitiated, these are two ways to reduce the amount of "spam" comments that could show up on a blog posting... comments that have an ulterior motive, usually to get a reader to click on a link that leads to who-knows-where, ultimately trying to sell something or some service. They are counterfeit and they're not wanted by most bloggers. I took this action because Blogger, the blog hosting service I use for my blogs, has a pretty good spam filter that catches almost all the spam comments that come through. I thought.
During the past week, I've had two instances of spam comments that have crept into the blog. Fortunately, neither was offensive on their face, just a short insincere fake comment and a link to somewhere in cyberspace. Both I deleted quickly.
However, I don't blog every day and I certainly don't want to be checking for spam comments multiple times each day. And sometimes we're camped in places where we have no access to the internet for days and I don't want to be worrying about spam during these glorious days off the grid.
So, before some truly offensive or damaging comment makes it into my blog without my knowledge, I'm turning "word verification" back on. I know it's a pain, but it's going to make me rest a tad easier knowing there's some kind of barrier between these nefarious cyber-kooks and my blog. For now, if you comment you'll have to do the word verification step (you know, "enter the word you see in the box above...") but your comment will appear immediately.
I sincerely hope this works. If, somehow, spam still makes it through, I'll have to turn moderation back on (approving every comment before it's posted), or just turn commenting off altogether. That would be unfortunate.
Thom
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3 comments:
I understand your frustration with comments, some kook out there is always making trouble for the rest of us.
Not a problem if you put in the extra security feature, it's no big deal. So far on our blog we have not had too many comment issues, maybe no body likes it enough to sabotage it... ;c)
Keep up the good work, we sure enjoy your posts and your perspective on things.
Hi Thom. What you've written here makes allot of sense. Where you are "off the grid" at times, I too wouldn't want the concern of what was being said or done to the blog while off the grid. Your decision is very sound.
Feedback from people is a wonderful part of a blog in my eyes...... So I hope the time doesn't come that you have no choice but to remove that from your blog.
sh
So far I've got comment moderation on on my blog, and have only gotten one attempt to spam it. (Mostly because my blog lacks popularity.) Some spammers have workarounds for any type of automated verification, so I wouldn't expect it to be very effective.
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