Use captcha or not on your blog comment?
Security is an issue each blogger have to aware off and growing trend of spamming make it big deal. You have to find a way to put you out from the hand of spammer. All giant sites use captcha system to get protected from it. It is hard for regular spammer to broke it down. However despite that many blogger still don’t use it for their blog security. Let’s find out why.
A part of blogger community don’t know the captcha system is available for Wordpress or not. Another community of blogger feel, it make the page speed slow. Some part of blogger community thought it hurt their commenter and the rest part think it is bandwidth eater.
Now time to discuss about these problems. For the first cause, the answer is simple. Captcha feature on comment is avilable on Wordpress and there is lot of plugin on this topic are available on Wordpress, all you need to choose right one which fit your need.
Now for the second community, I have some advise. Captcha make your site slow when you use an external server to get the captcha like BotProof captcha used an external server. You can use Simple Captcha which situated on your server and depends only on your server speed.
What about the third community! The are true in their line. Many people still too lazy to write down the captcha in a box however they show their full attention when they are on Facebook or DIGG or any other giant site. I also thought blogger should not care about those people. Usually blog commenter are also a blogger or website owner so you can expect responsible person on your blog who know the value of commenting.
For the remaining community, I don’t have any answer. All I need to say, bot hit your site again and again which also eat your bandwidth and if you able to discourage them you going to save lot of bandwidth. You may not protect your bandwidth from already active bot as they never visit your site to see what type of security you implemented but it definitely discourage new spammer.
Now decide what is best for you a captcha system or an open spamming blog. Its time to rethink your strategy.
This is not the only issue.What about comment hijacking.I think blogger should also think about this issue.
Nah, I’d inclined to say ‘nay’ — captcha is annoying for readers. It can prevent spam from intruding the comment form, sure, but it still can’t prevent a real spammer, yes?
I am using Captcha\’s and are the best one to avoid automated spam comments.
Better to use captcha,or delete your spam posts every day..;)
Arafat, one advice, DO NOT use captcha, specially if you don\’t have lot of traffic. I had to spend 5 minutes and after 15 failed comment, to make this comment. Captcha\’s are really a turn off
Good Decision
I think akismet is good enough to stop comments. Also remove this rich text editor, I don’t think its required, comments don’t need formatting
Hello Arafat,
There is much debate over the use of Captcha etc.
Akismet does a great job, but when facing an attempted MySQL Injection attack and several Spambot attacks which have lasted for several weeks, I had to implement Block-Spam-By-Math and it works well.
Comment hijacking and content theft are on the increase too, which is a sad reflection on those who cannot provide their own original material.
You are right cotojo. I just trying to implement more user friendly way to block those spam. I think math will work fine. I will try it.
Thanks for this article Arafat. I have a query. Is allowing readers to insert links and rich text into their comments a good idea? Would this affect the security of the blog?
I enjoy this site, it is worth me coming back
I’ve got loads of bandwidth thanks to hosting with Hostgator so I really don’t care about the bots consuming my bandwidth cos my blog doesn’t have Captcha. Some folks just don’t like answering captchas thus I use wp spam free to secure my comment form.
WP Spam Free work great with Akismet. Great idea to use that one.
Yeah you are right Ricky. However The most devastating fact to me is content theft, despite Adsense warning many Adsense user still copying content so as other new blogger.
@blackzero Every blogger have their own view. Thanks for your comment.
@InkAPoint I also support it.
Really, I just close it now for all. I know I have to spend 30 extra minute now but I love my visitors.
Thanks for notifying me. I never concentrate on reply field till my 6 month anniversary however now I am ready to react.
It’s depend on your effort. If you able to check each link and their quality then it’s ok. Otherwise, It is best to stay away from it. Anyway, thanks for giving me this topic I will write about it in my new blog allblogtips.com.