In an effort to prevent comment spam on blogs, Blogger released a new feature called “word verification”. The idea is some seemingly random letters are shown as an image and they can only be verified by a real person. In order for a comment to be valid, the user has to verify the letters in the picture. Theoretically, software that spam blogs is unable to verify these letters.
We do not use word verification on Our Thoughts. It is unfair that our visitors be forced through an extra step because of the efforts of spammers. It should be the spammers who are punished, not our legitimate visitors. That being said, I am willing to keep deleting each spam comment by hand rather than make it more difficult for visitors to comment.
On that note, if the spam becomes to intense, then we may switch to our own web space (perhaps on HotPepper.ca). That switch would be transparent to our visitors, and it will be easier for administering spam (especially spam that is automatically deleted). However, it is not as simple to post as it is with Blogger, so there would be a learning curve for our less technically-minded team members.
Rest assured that at this point, we are remaining on Blogger. I’ve pestered Blogger for a moderated comment feature, but we’ll see if they will listen.
You might be able to stay on blogspot and get rid of the spammers by unlisting Our Thoughts.
I think the way the spammers work is through the random blog script that Blogger has made available. If your blog didn’t come up as a random blog, the spammers probably wouldn’t bother you.
The downside is the potentially lost readership of “random” blog surfers.
Good point.
I had already told it to not notify weblogs.com when a new post is made and that helped for about a month. I will try this and see if it makes a difference. I rarely get comments from random surfers.