CAPTCHA

Word verification (CAPTCHA) is used by the majority of bloggers to screen comments. Unfortunately, it operates as the LETTER OF THE LAW (pun intended), not the spirit of the law. It’s meant to prohibit bad users, but ends up prohibiting good users as well.

Purpose of Word Verification: CAPTCHA is designed to prevent automated spam—to verify that your user is a human being, not a computer. Blogspot now uses a double word CAPTCHA which I find challenging at times… "Is that an ‘n’ or an ‘r’?”

The Drawbacks of Word Verification. It:

• can be difficult to read--impossible for the seeing-impaired
• can add 1-2 steps to the commenting process
• can prevent people from commenting
• does nothing to prevent rude or vulgar human comments
• doesn't stop all programs created by spammers anyway!

Should You Use CAPTCHA?

Obviously, you should pray about it, but here's my suggestions:

• If you’re moderating your comments, why not turn it off and make it easier for people to make comments on your posts?
• If you’ve had problems with machine-generated spam comments, then maybe you should use it. But remember it won't help with offensive human comments. And make sure that screening out bad users is worth losing some good users.
• I don't moderate comments, but I still don't use CAPTCHA. 

On my two sites, I cut my spam by 99% by simply prohibiting anonymous comments.  

I don’t know about you, but I am blessed by comments, and I don’t want to dissuade people from leaving them. Why not leave me one now and let me know your experience with spammers, CAPTCHA, and comments. I'm sure there are things I could learn from you.

P.S. = How to disable CAPTCHA on Blogspot:

Go to Design, then Settings, then Posts and Comments, then click "no" beside "Show Word Verification?"

P.S.S. = Spam on your page view stats

I admit computer-generated spam is annoying. Even though I don't get spam comments, I get a lot of computer-generated page views a month, usually from sites in Russia (somehow they make illegal money from this). Unfortunately, this is common and the best thing to do is ignore it or report it to Blogspot/Google. You get more accurate stats on Google Analytics.

Caution: Make sure you never check out a suspicious url while viewing your stats. When spammers get visits from your site, they tend to send more spam your way. If you want to check out a url, copy and paste it into a separate browser first.