File under General Geekery:
It came to my attention a while back that the comment submission procedure on Movable Type 4 (and specifically this blog) was less than elegant. So I turned off the default registration-required settings and set it to allow for anonymous Captcha-filtered comments. But it turns out that this was even a worse idea because the Captcha didn’t even show up on the comment submission form, leading to unpredictable errors when a comment was submitted. It went something like this:
Step 1: Comment Submission: “Hello, I’m submitting this comment on an entry and there is no spam checking – wow! There isn’t even a Captcha image! I’m going to tell all of my pharmaceutical distributor friends!”
Step 2: User clicks submit, with evil spam plots brewing in the back of his or her mind.
Step 3: Movable Type processes the comment and checks whether the entered text matched the generated Captcha. Here’s the problem – the end user never saw a Captcha image.
Result: End user gets an ugly message and runs around in circles in frustration, their evil plans to spam-bomb me having been defeated.
Meanwhile, I’m pleased that I’m not getting any comment spam, but I’m feeling a little rejected because I’m not getting any valid comments either. I’m thinking that I might welcome some spam. I know people are reading – I get several emails a week asking follow up questions. I keep thinking to myself, why don’t they just enter a comment – maybe someone else can help?
The Five Minute Solution: Take out all of the screwy if/else statements from the Comment Form template so that the Captcha will display no matter what. Since I took out all of the other authentication methods these statements aren’t needed anyways. This seems to work, so comments are working (for now…)
Thank God you finally turned comments on without registering! There have been so many times I’ve wanted to post comments about your posts! I’m an avid reader.
BTW, on wordpress, you can set it to where it automatically spams key words that you type in. I get a lot of spam on my blog from pharmaceutical junk so I just add the specific word that’s been spamming me (adderall, codeine, etc.)and voila…no spam containing those words. Maybe you can do something like that on Movable Type.
The Captcha is overkill.
All you need is a challenge question that anybody can answer easily … 99.9 percent of blogs never get enough traffic to warrant somebody going to the trouble of figuring out your “answer” manually… virtually all blog spam is sent by bots.
That’s true, but that would require me to spend 5 minutes customizing a template instead of using default configuration, and who has 5 minutes when they could spend it hiking…or twittering…
I love your blog and would like to subscribe via email. Do you offer this option? I tried your email but the address doesn’t work. Thanks!!