Thursday, April 10, 2008

What is a bigger hassle than spam?

Capchas are bigger hassle than spam. I just had to type in a captcha to send a blasted email from my Yahoo account, and it actually takes me longer to enter the code than it takes me to type the email. This is supposed to prevent spam, but it is more annoying than the annoyance it is designed to prevent.

Sure, I use word verification on my blogs. But that is to prevent porn ads from being posted in the comment section. I'm trying for a PG rating on this blog. Porn ads in my email inbox I can just delete.

3 comments:

  1. I only hate it when I get the capcha wrong three times in a row and am considered a spammer.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was getting spammers on a couple of my blogs on occasion, so I just check the comments every couple of days.

    As far as email spam, since I switched to g-mail as my host, I haven't had to deal with it that much.

    I did a test recently to see how much spam I was getting. G-mail starts deleting spam that is over 30 days old, and I had over 4000 spam emails before they started toping out.

    Now let's see if I can type your capcha letters correctly...

    ReplyDelete
  3. All the comments are emailed to me as soon as they are posted, but it can take me up to 16 hours to deal with an obscene post. Back when Mike ran the LPAC blog, I kept finding comments that said stuff like "Great blog!! This is very interesting. If you ever need information on water pump valves, click here!" Then there was a commenter called "Sink Sink Socks" who may have been a troll and not a spammer. Those comments were just jibberish with links to German porn sites. Comments like this can remain on a blog for several hours.

    Maybe I should disable word verification if all I'm worried about is keep minors away from porn ads. Any kid using a PC without Net Nanny on it is bound to see porn and is probably going to grow up to be a serial killer
    as a result.
    There are several characters that should never appear in capchas: I,l,1,0,O, and letters that where the lower case looks like the upper case.

    ReplyDelete