FYI - comments are moderated due to large amount of blog comment spam
June 15th, 2006 by Dan YorkBy the way, if you have left a comment to this blog and noticed that it didn’t appear right away, it is because we are unfortunately moderating all comments due to recieving a great amount of blog comment spam (As an example, in one recent 24-hour period, we received over 35 bogus comments across a whole range of posts here). It truly is amazing the lengths the spammers will go to in order to increase the search engine ranking of their websites. The recent variants include some mundane comment as the text (such as “Great website. I learned a lot. Keep up the great work.”) but then put the spammer’s URL in the URL for the comment author (which we currently display). It’s a bit subtle in that at first glance you might want to approve the comment… until you look at the URL.
Anyway, we are going to keep moderation on until we get a chance to put in some type of CAPTCHA system or other way to prevent bots and scripts from injecting all these comments. And yes, we do realize that spammers are paying people to sit there and fill out comment fields, thereby defeating CAPTCHA tools… but hey, at least we would eliminate the automated spam - and it potentially forces spammers to lose some profit by paying people, which somehow doesn’t upset me at all. 
June 16th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
And just to provide another data point… between last night at 10:30pm and this morning at 8:30am, 25 comments were submitted to a range of the blog postings here. Of those, exactly *1* was a real comment. The other 24 were spam.
July 4th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
[...] I sent a message the other day on ebay, and came across a new feature: to submit a message you now have to prove you are not spammer but human (these being opposites) with a Turing test or CAPTCHA. Ok, these things are common on web systems these days, but the new slant here was that if you could not read the graphic, you could click on a link and download an audio version to listen to instead. This is also one of the proposed strategies for dealing with SPIT (SPAM over Internet Telephony) in our VoIP systems of the future, i.e. interact with the bona fide caller or spammer and present them with some kind of test or quiz before they get put through. This could be as simple as “Press 8 to speak to Martyn or 0 for voicemail.” [...]