As longtime readers may remember, and all readers will have noticed, some time ago I turned off word verification for comments on this blog. I did it because of requests from some of my fellow ABC Wednesday bloggers, but I have to admit, it’s much easier to leave comments without word verification.
This has NOT resulted in a dramatic increase in spam comments posted: In fact, it’s always been pretty rare for spam comments to ever get through. However, when I turned off word verification, I saw an absolute explosion in the number of notification emails I received, telling me a comment needed moderation when, in fact, it was shunted to the spam queue. I have no idea why that would happen.
In the past day or so, the number of emails suddenly dropped: One email a day this weekend, rather than the one or two dozen I often get. If the email volume goes back up, I plan to turn off email notifications altogether. That means people posting legitimate comments to older posts may not see their comment appear for days, because I sometimes go days without checking my comment queue. The alternative was to turn word verification back on, and no one wants that, including me.
Hardly anyone comments on old posts, so this change will affect very few people in any given year, but I like to be as transparent as possible about what I’m doing and why. All things considered, turning off word verification was a great improvement.
2 comments:
Strange. I was getting, on my blog, about 200 spam comments PER DAY for about three weeks. Now it's back to under 5 per day.
Maybe some major spam mill somewhere was taken down. I got a lot more spam comments per day than I got emails notifications for, which is what made it so weird: All spam comments went into the spam queue, but some of them generated automatic emails for me to moderate them—even though they were in the spam queue.
Then, they suddenly all but stopped. Weird.
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