AmateurRadio.com

For the last few months I have been getting more and more irritated by the captcha word verification required to comment on certain blogs. The captchas Blogger used to use were perfectly adequate, in my opinion. But Blogger insists on “improving” its user interface. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it I say.

The latest two-part captchas Blogger uses seem designed to keep out the good guys and allow in the bad. The statement “Please prove you’re not a robot” seems ironic, as only a robot could decipher the letters. This morning, on a blog I won’t mention, I had to refresh the captcha three times before getting one that contained only recognizable letters.

Of course if Blogger’s captchas were annoying me they were also annoying you, my readers. So I decided to disable word verification on both G4ILO’s Blog and One Foot in the Grave. At the same time, I have enabled moderation for comments to posts more than 2 days old. Most of the valid comments are made within that time period anyway. If a comment is made later than that then a further small delay until I approve it will hardly be noticed. Hopefully this will result in an increase in valid comments and fewer spammy ones. But if I find too many spammers are taking advantage of the two day window of opportunity I’ll turn moderation on for all comments. If any internet lowlifes are reading this, don’t even think about it.

For the benefit of anyone who arrives here looking for a way to turn off word verification, here’s how. First, make sure you are using the old Blogger interface (I’d switched back to it already as I could never find anything in the new one.) Then, under Manage Blogs, click on Settings for your blog. Then click on Comments in the row of tabs along the top. The settings you need are on that page.

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