
My "Dream Captcha"
NO COMMENT…
Think about this for a minute. If you allow site visitors to leave comments to your posts, they are adding content to your site.
Getting feedback in the form of comments is often the sole benefit of your literary effort, and hey, it’s nice to see that somebody actually reads your stuff. But, you really need to pay attention to what is showing up in your comments.
You might not know this, but you as a the site owner, may be unwittingly hosting content (via comments) that violates a search engine’s quality guidelines (Google), which can harm your site’s standing in search results. Yikes! All that hard work down the dispose-all, thanks to some cretan in Lower Spamistan!
Take a look at some of your spam comments, and you’ll get an idea of what I mean. The worst offenders contain links to nefarious ads, sites or clandestine malware which, when discovered by Google, Bing or Yah0o, will cause your site to pick up a new, free “landing” page greeting your visitors with something a bit unsettling like: “REPORTED ATTACK SITE – WARNING.” Ouch!
If this is happening to you, remember, it’s your site, and you are responsible for everything there – abuse notwithstanding.
What can you do? Well, short of disabling comments altogether, make sure you are using Akismet, the free spam blocker from WordPress. Amazingly, some 83% of all site comments are disingenuous spam (bummer), and Akismet will catch and prevent most of it from ever hitting your pages.
To level the playing field even more, consider using another freebie; reCaptcha, now owned by Google. Annoying to some (a bit like life), Captcha’s are those puzzle things, one must “solve,” proving same is human and capable of (hopefully) responsible behavior. And, because you asked, “CAPTCHA” is the acronym for: “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
I realize nobody enjoys being subjected to a “test” simply to leave a comment, but it’s not arrogant to include this site safeguard. Rather, to your credit, and everyone’s benefit, Captcha’s play a big part in stopping the bad guys. Besides, and ponder along – if this wasn’t important, Google likely wouldn’t have bought the company.