Tuesday, April 27, 2010

RANT

Dear Bloggers Who Use Captchas,

please stop using captchas.
They're annoying.

More than once, I've written a comment, clicked "publish comment," exited out of the window before the screen reloads with that annoying box asking me to type "SingAPore coUCh."  And you better believe I'm not typing that comment again.  

I don't want to sound like a dick here.  I had a captcha when I first started until one of my readers demanded I get rid of it.  So I did.  And the results were the occasional spam comment all of which were easily deleted forever.  

So please, stop using captchas.  Your comments will go up, at least your comments from me will.

Sincerely,
Gringo
He Shot Cyrus


11 comments:

Simon said...

Right on, sister.

xTJMac510x said...

Yeah I'm with ya buddy. I hate when I write a big long comment and then before it can get posted I have to type a captchas in. I stopped doing them about 3 weeks ago because I thought it would be easier for people to comment. That and I can delete any spam that I got. Good PSA rant though and I hope more people take notice

simoncolumb said...

yeah - im in complete agreement!

Simon

dw said...

i recently had to install captchas on killerbuds.net because there was some entities that were spamming every single blogpost 3-5 times and they were re-doing the same nonsense comments after i'd go through and delete all of them. i wasn't a big fan of them, but now i unfortunately find them necessary to operating. i hope that you don't hate our webpage because of that. of course, our need may be related to the fact that we run blogging software on our servers instead of using blogger because blogger effed us over and discontinued service to all ftp or sftp setups. so i guess there is a price for independence from google.

xTJMac510x said...

Hey Scott- sorry about the whole captchas thing popping up again. I thought I DID get rid of them. I guess it didn't save or something happened or I got hacked but they are gone gone now. I double checked. Hoped everything is cleared up now

TALKING MOVIEzzz said...

I use the Blogger captchas which aren't that bad.

Sadly, even with them, I get a lot of spam. ("Hi, love your blog. Check out this site for low priced medication!!") I'm afraid of what it would be like without them.

Well, I remember what it was like without them, so they have become a necessary evil.

Jason Soto said...

I started using them cause one day, about a year ago, I got like 50 email notifications saying I had 50 comments on 50 different blog posts, all within a minute of each other. They just kept coming. So after I deleted them, I turned on Captcha AND comment moderation. Soon, I took off the moderation cause I didn't think it was that big of a deal to write 5 letters. Plus it's set up easily enough on my blog where you see you have to type it before hitting submit. Sorry, Scot.
-Jason

Runs Like A Gay said...

I can only dream of getting the traffic to my blog that leads to endless spam.

So I'm completely with you on this one.

maLaYAsoFa (oops)

whitney said...

Woah! Aaron knows a lot about the internet!

JLG said...

Didn't even realize how annoying that could be. Mine's off now in case anyone wants to comment me. :)

Fletch said...

I've gone back and forth with captcha over the years, and am currently in OFF position (spammers: pls ignore that last comment). If there's a rush, I'll turn it back on. It doesn't bother me so much to use it at other sites; I do have an issue with Blogger spazzing out and losing my comments, certainly, but I don't see the relation to captcha there.

I think I've found the best happy medium anyhow. Turn captcha off, allow anyone and everyone to post, but turn on comment moderation for posts older than 7 days. Works like a charm for me. Sure, a random person might comment on an older post, but shit, I'm on the computer for 67 hours a day anyway, so it's not like it's sitting there for long before I approve it (unless it's during the 5 hours I'm sleeping). Meanwhile, a number of spam comments come with those posts, but rejecting them is a piece of cake. Problem solved.