With the increasing number of spam comments, the issue is that I am in danger of deleting very good comments that have accidentally ended up in the spam filter. I am going to try using some additional plugins. The first I am trying is a conditional captcha. So if you get an image such as:
please be patient and add the requested information. If there is an issue and it rejects what you put in, you can go back with your browser. Remember if there is a significant problem please contact me via email. I hope this increases, not decreases the issues, and improves the quality of discussion here.
I’ve been noticing an increase in spam this summer, often in the form of cmments that obviously don’t take the thread anywhere, but with a link to somewhere nothing to do with it. I’m using the Blogger “mark as Spam” option manually, and that seems to be OK for now, but we do have to make sure we don’t get hijacked, and good commenters get taken seriously, so I’m not offended by the sensible steps you’ve taken…
Thanks for your comment, Bishop Alan. I think it illustrates well the way I hope that this will work – and it seems to. Yours was a comment that previously would have been accepted by my spam filter, and so it came through without any captcha to complete (I think I’m right). But, had, previously yours been a comment that my spam filter would have put into the “spam” folder, then it would have asked you to prove you were human by following the captcha process. This means good comments are not being lost – as they might have previously. That is my hope. Since installing the plug in I have had no spam – usually I would have had upwards of 30 spam comments by now. Thanks again for being the first to trial this 🙂