I’m not a big fan of Captcha use – sometimes it’s just a pain in the buttock. But I am even more of a not-big-fan of SPAM comments. They actually serve no purpose whatsoever. About 70% of the SPAM is for a site that doesn’t exist. 10% is for sites that exist and run just fine. The other 20% is for a site that does exist, but isn’t actually in the comments section – it’s in the SPAM bot’s website. A lot of good those do, right? That means 10% of all those comments (over 400 just this year) actually work. Now it’s obvious that I have been moderating them so no one else can see, but 360 comments this year have been utter BS.

So, starting today, I finally implemented the Captcha service for signing up for new users/making comments on the site. But I also made it so that all new comments are posted without delay (hopefully), so no more moderation (also hopefully).

***EDIT***

I’ve noticed that bots are still getting through. So I made the Captcha difficulty Medium instead of Easy. I have also added XSS JAVA based blocking protocols to the site, so hopefully that curbs the SPAM a little more. I guess I’ll always have to moderate it at least a little.