Help! I have a blogger.com weblog and recently I’ve been overrun by blog spam. Surely there’s a way to minimize this problem? I’ve seen lots of sites that have “challenges”, ranging from hard-to-read words to mathematical equations, but I have no idea how to accomplish this in blogger.
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!
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Approvals needed for screenshots?
I’m writing an e-book and notice that in other e-books people often use screenshots to illustrate various points, e.g. a Google search result. What’s the standard practice in terms of permission – do authors generally ask permission to reproduce a screenshot,or just use it the way you might quote a line or a phrase from a website or a book without asking special permission?
This is a great tip on reducing spam. I will definately read your blog from now on. By the way, why not try your luck at some online poker? Also, please contact me for some free vi-agra or ci-alis. Just kidding, but you could still get spammed by real people. By the way, the solve the equation thing has one flaw, STUPID PEOPLE.
I have a half dozen or so Blogger.com blogs, for various purposes. Comment spam isn’t a huge problem, but it happens. I’ve turned on captchas on some of them, and it has completely eliminated the comment spam, while the others still get the occasional spam comment. FWIW, it seems to be working for me.