I'm restoring @#$#&%$ CAPTCHA Feature

A while back Jeremiah Owyang became about the 10th person to tell me he hated the CAPTCHA feature I had activated on this Typepad account. This is the thigamajig that asks you to identify a string of characters when leaving a comment.  He said it discouraged him from leaving as many comments as he might.

Like most bloggers, I want as many comments as my readers will give me. Blogging is not about publishing as much as it is about conversations. Even when my friend Jim Forbes is leaving a comment telling me I'm dead wrong on my contempt for fake Steve Jobs, I want comments.

So, following Jeremiah's I turned off Captcha and allowed unmodified posting of comments. On the first day I received 17 spam Comments, on the second day 34.  On the third day, the number was over 60 when I decided to install Comment Modification.

Comment modification meant that I had to read comments before they would get posted. This has slowed the conversation down. Unless I have time to read them as they come in, some Comments have been delayed for 24 hours before i got to them.  Plus, I still have to pour through the spam crap every day, which has become both tedious and depressing.

So, I have restored CAPTCHA because I have no other options.  I have to say that this is one area where Tyepad seems to me to be doing a worse job than other sites where the character strings are more legible to the human eye.  other sites have simple math problems to solve.

Besides, Jeremiah hasn't left me a single comment in the entire time that CAPTCHA was turned off.

I hope you will all keep those cards and letters coming

Comments

[Jeremiah Owyang]

I'm having tremendous success with Wordpress, consider it as a solution in the future.

[Jim Forbes]

Thanks, Shel. I hop[e you're doing very well. Seen your grandson recently? I can hardly wait till I have one of my own to warp and teach how to spit, whittle and question authority.
Best
Jim Forbes
(from retirement in Escondido with two big gardens and a small dog)

[John Cass]

Ouch again for TypePad, my sympathies Shel, I have the same problem on my TypePad blog every time I remove moderation the spam comments return.