I visited the beach with my family and had a lovely time.

Waves, sand, sun, relaxed husband and happy children. It was perfect.

Then I arrived home to discover more than 2000 spam comments awaiting me on my blog. Two thousand! All advertisements for knock-off handbags, sunglasses, and shoes deposited by spam-bots. That’s more than 100 pages of spam. And each one has to be manually removed from the “comments pending” queue.

I’ve resisted implementing a “captcha” code here. I think they’re a pain for commenters. But something had to be done!

So I went searching for a captcha plug-in that would only appear the first time you comment on my blog.

The way it works is you’ll see a string of letters or letters and numbers in a window on your computer screen when you click the “post” button for your comment. The plug-in will ask you to type two of them into the window. Please do so and then click the “I’m human” button.

Your comment will then appear in my “pending comments” queue. I’ll click “approve,” and it will appear in the comments below the blog post.

The next time you post a comment, you won’t see the captcha screen and your comment will appear right away!

Email me, if that’s not the way it’s working for you, and I’ll try to fix it. Or I’ll try a different captcha plug-in.

Fingers crossed!

Update 9/6/2014: I’ve received no reports of difficulty posting from my commenters, so yay! And the captcha has saved me from 21,923 spams thus far. I think it’s working. 😀

For more about blogging:
Copyright Statement for My Website
Why Create a Site Map?
Slow Blogging and Other Variations
New Home Page