When I launched this site, already expecting a certain level of spam, I moderated all comments by hand. My idea always was to not burden my visitors with spam avoidance measures. After all, why should their web experience be encumbered just because there are some morons in the wild who think it's a good idea to send badly spelled, obscene and annoying messages out to the entire world?
Still, some months after the page launch, spam grew to a level were it became pretty stressful to moderate each message by hand. So I used Akismet to filter spam (Akismet is an internet service for recognizing spam in comments, emails or in other forms with a huge database of known spam messages). This helped greatly, I now only had about 10 messages a day to moderate by hand because the spam filter wasn't sure about what to do.
However, I have seen some genuine comments being discarded as spam by this filter. So that would mean I still have to wade through the entire stack of messages to make sure no comments are lost. Than, and the number of spam messages that came through increased steadily.
That's why, as of today, this site will employ a captcha check when you post any comments or use my contact form. I'm very sad that it has come this far, but the spammers are relentless. The service I'm using now is Recaptcha. While validating that you're not a spam bot, you'll help the service to scan books that could not be digitalized by OCR software.
This is how it works: each time a comment is posted, the commenter has to visually recognize two words. One word is known to the recaptcha service, this is the control word. The other word is unknown and recaptcha will use your answer to make out the meaning. The answers from a large number of people will be weighted and the most probable choice is assumed to be the actual word. Cool, isn't it?
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