Anti-spam tools now in effect: Bad Behavior active

Posted on 13 November 2007
Filed under Administrative

The comment spammers recently have started hitting this site hard. This wastes my time on moderating comments and wastes my bandwidth with my host. I’ve installed Bad Behavior to address the problem; hopefully it will help.

This shouldn’t inconvenience any legitimate readers. If there is a false positive, you should receive a notification page with information on how to contact me. The Bad Behavior FAQ also has information on what to do if you’ve suffered the business end of a false positive.

I’ve also installed reCAPTCHA, but have it turned off for now. I don’t want to force captchas on my commenters, as much as I support digitizing public domain books. (If you want to volunteer to help digitize free books, you can fill out reCAPTCHA for fun here, or simply join Distributed Proofreaders.) I may turn it on if things get really hairy.

I’m also considering installing Akismet, but I’ll wait until I see the effect Bad Behavior has. (I prefer not to use Spam Karma because it’s not free software.)

Commenters are still required to register a (free) account on the site. If Bad Behavior keeps down the noise, I may lift that requirement, maybe replacing it with reCAPTCHA and/or Akismet.

My goal is to make it as easy as possible for legitimate users to comment here, imposing the fewest barriers necessary to keep the site spam-free. I apologize for the inconvenience and do appreciate when visitors comment.

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