Adding captcha to blogger.com blogs to minimize comment spam?

While blogging opens up many new doors in terms of communicating with your market segment (or friends) and creating a dialog with your customers (or, again, friends), it also has some perils as you're learning the hard way. Indeed, there are few things more frustrating in the blogging world than waking up to dozens - or even hundreds - of spurious "comment spam" entries that point to gambling sites, porn sites, or worse.

You can go and delete them in the blogger.com system, but that's a huge hassle and if you're seeing lots of these as it sounds like you are, it can sap your enthusiasm for blogging in quick order, to the point where you might just toss in the proverbial towel on blogging altogether.

Fortunately, before you get to anything quite so drastic, there's a way you can add word verification to your blogger.com account with just a few mouse clicks.

To start, log in to your blogger.com account and click on the "Settings" tab. You'll see a top nav menu like this:

Click on the "Comments" sub-menu and you'll see a pile of different options, with the one you want about 2/3 of the way down the screen:

Select "Yes" here, choose "Save Settings", and you'll now have word capture enabled on your comments and that should, almost like magic, either eliminate your comment spam completely or at least reduce it to an easily manageable trickle of annoyance rather than a tsunami of pain.

Here's how it'll end up looking once you have everything configured:

By the way, if you hear people talk about captcha or comment captcha this is what they're talking about, even if the Blogger folk (who are, of course, owned by Google) refer to it in their interface as "word verification".

Hope this helps you regain control of your blog!