The comment policy has changed; check the page links for the details. The big change: I’ve turned off the CAPTCHA page that would be presented for comments judged to be “borderline” spam by the spam filter software.
For those not aware, CAPTCHA is the name given to the funny letters and numbers on weird backgrounds that you sometimes have to type in to do things on certain web sites. The idea was that computers couldn’t read those letters and numbers, but humans could; thus, each solved CAPTCHA was proof that a human had done whatever it was that had been done.
CAPTCHA had issues even from the beginning. They present obvious issues for the blind, and were often simple enough to be read by modern OCR software. Because of this, I never turned it on for every comment, and any comment rejected because of the CAPTCHA just went into the moderation queue. But I’m now convinced that CAPTCHA has reached the end of its useful life.
So when a commenter on my last post expressed his dissatisfaction with my CAPTCHA, I decided it was time to turn it off. And so, references to it have been expunged from my comment policy.
The Esperanto translation of my comment policy has also been updated, in the hopes that I might someday post a little more often in that language. It’s also been moved to a page.
Wise. Very wise. The ‘cure worse than the disease’… is now cured. LOL. Wish more sites would consider such improvements.
[But yeah, now see what kind of riff-raff commenters stop by? *smile*]
Hi all!
about “Esperanto”, forget it!, the idea was great but, the world speaks English, and you’d better learn Spanish, it’s not so different!. Makes me think about Klaatu, (from the “BadApplePodcast”), who said twice that Esperanto was “LANGUAGE AGNOSTIC!!!” uuuuhhhhhhhh!. Reine.
http://recaptcha.org/ is nice, especially if you want to further the digitalization for archive.org..
Esperanto is a nice language, and a good community. Considering how easy it is to learn European languages you might as well learn Romanian, Italian and french as well if you are learning Spanish.
Thanks for removing the eyetest. Thanks for continuing with Esperanto. And recaptcha is almost as broken as other captchas IME. Use anti-spam instead.
Many WordPress bloggers are turning off the Akismet plugin because Akismet is censoring huge numbers of intelligent commentators. We were turning to captchas to reduce the hundreds of bot spam messages we’re getting hit with every day.
We are testing various Captchas and would like your input on why you decided to remove them. I recognize that even though a Captcha system has an audio option that there could be visually impaired readers who do not have speakers or whose speakers are not working.
What else can you share about why you decided to remove the captcha here and how you handle the spam problem?