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Oh dear. How many times have I clicked submit on a Typepad blog comment form and moved on to the next site only to accidentally come back hours later and discover the CAPTCHA waiting for me?
I don’t think I’ve lost a comment yet, but they could have put the CAPTCHA on the same page as the comment form. If that’s impossible, the comment form should warn the visitor that a second page needs to be filled out. It’s not rocket science.
I hate those CAPTCHA’s especially the ones over the page.
At times I have deleted my comment when asked to fill out a second image.
Afterall, I am there for a visit not a months holiday!
Agree absolutely Donncha – I hate CAPTCHAs.
Any anti-spam solution which throws a burden back on the commenter is nothing short of laziness on the part of the person deploying it.
Tom is ignoring the fact that if you’re a Typepad user it’s the only solution available unless your willing to moderate your own comment spam.
Having received 400+ comment spams a day, and lost comments when I missed them in the spam pile or having had to declare comment bankruptcy having been away from internet for a few weeks that’s not a viable solution. Were there an automated spam robot available for Typepad I’d use it, there isn’t (I don’t get why not) so Captcha is as good as it gets.
12:08pm. I’ve just turned Captcha off. We’ll give it 24 hours and see how many comment spams I get.
And another reason to hate the separate page method: if you’re doing a custom Typepad design, you can’t style the captcha page, once you’ve made the switch from basic to advanced templates. And of course, you only discover that afterwards.
Mark is ignoring the fact that Typepad is not the only blogging platform. Some blogging platforms actually have extremely good anti-spam tools.
I don’t use CAPTCHAs on my blog and Akismet has blocked 465,300 spams and counting.
Tom is ignoring the fact that if I want to be read internally I have to be sure to be on the only platform I *know* is and will continue to be on the Websense white list.
Regardless of how the wind blows in the IT department.
Mark – this wasn’t a dig at you btw, just at Typepad. Your blog happened to remind me of the problem!
I’m amazed Typepad doesn’t support Akismet yet though. It simply doesn’t make sense for them to ignore the app.
Aha!
So the problem is that EMC are preventing you from using a spam resistant blog platform?
It doesn’t make sense for them to do a lot of things. To be honest as a platform the rust has really set in.
They’ve substituted widgets for any real innovation and as a pay service I’d have expected them to get with the times. I did have a tech support issue a while back which they did resolve within the hour so that’s something at least. “Unlimited” storage would be a nice gimme as well.
Mark – any time you want to (and can) move back to WordPress just give me a call and I’ll help you configure everything.
EMC aren’t preventing me from using anything..now.
That took a bit of education and resulted in a note from the C-level of the company to IT when they blew my blog offline for a lot of my readers (Hosted on Vox at the time as it was brand new and I had a beta invite), when they shut down internal access to it.
They removed the block, but I moved to TypePad where the execs are blogging in case it ever happened again. And after a bit of work they’ve removed the blocks on the MySpaces/YouTubes/LiveJournals of the world at one stage all three were blocked, now none are and FaceBook/Twitter have never been blocked.
At this stage they’re pretty progressive about what they’ll allow you to access since they log everything anyway. Websense will come down on anything they know you’re just farting around with, it’s not like you can tell someone to trust you as an employee if you’re looking at porn sites at work.
Makes very good sense: They’re a different company, a competitor to Automattic and they have their own solutions.
Akismet isn’t perfect, has a number of issues (ie putting our trust in someone else who may or may not has a bias, not being able to whitelist, very slow response to active spammers on the same IP address, false positives, etc.) and we’ve just spent the last 3 weeks on and off removing it from my servers. A simple solution of an internal blacklist, trackbacks having their IP address checked to see if the ip address is coming from the actual site referenced, and a couple of other methods is what works for us.
drmike – Akismet doesn’t compete with any of their products. Automattic is a competing company in the blog space but not in anti-spam.
Pity Typepad couldn’t do the same checks you do if they do feel strongly about using Automattic tech.
Some one really has to come up with something better than Captchas. I don’t think anyone likes them. I really hate those ones with lots of colours so even though I have perfect eye sight, I have to look twice to make sure I have got it right, and even then end up getting it wrong.
I can see why typepad would ignore it, very few companies acknowledge that any of their competitors might have a good product, even when it would be to their advantage.
Agreed. I’ve got to admit that I like the method that whooami uses where it’s a text field where you just copy over the text beside it.
It’s beatable but 1) is visable within all browsers, even text ones, 2) it’s a field which works, especially since you’re already filling in other fields, and 3) it’s not knowledge dependent to be able to come up with the answers. (ie “What color is grass?” Well in Africa, most grass I believe is brown, not green…)
Hehehe, I sometimes have the same problem. Sometimes I write a real nice and long comment to an issue which is very important for me and then I submit and it does not work. Sometimes I even have problems reading those strange signes and I do not know if it is case sensitive or not.
Its especially bad if I’m sleepy whis is 90% of the time – =)
CAPTCHA is good. but there are many work-around to by-pass CAPTCHA. But most important reason to me to refrain from using CAPTCHA is it kills the usability of my site. I have already written an article about CAPTCHA and usability in my site.
-Nish