Stop Blog Comment Spam with Word Verification

As I just discussed in my post about comment moderation, blog comment spam can be a real problem for bloggers trying to maintain a high standard of content quality and prevent unwanted posters from clogging up their comments with commercial pitches for their own spammy sites. In addition to enabling content moderation, another useful feature that can help stop comment spammers is word verification. Most reputable blogging software should provide this option; in Blogger, it's available in the Comments section of the Settings tab in the blog dashboard.

What is word verification, exactly? It's a feature that forces all commenters to enter a word or a random series of letters presented in an image file each time they want to post a comment. If the letters aren't entered correctly, the comment can't be posted. By placing the letters inside a graphic file rather than as standard HTML text, the verification feature prevents them from being read by automated scripts often used by comment spammers to post comments on thousands of blogs at once. If the spam software can't read the letters, there's no way it can post a comment. This is a quick and easy way to stop lots of automated spam bots that would otherwise start dumping unwanted crap in your comments.

Of course, an unusually dedicated comment spammer will actually take the time to enter the comment manually, read off the letters and submit their comment by hand. That's why you need comment moderation switched on as well, so you can individually review each comment that's posted.

The big question in the future will be whether spam software can be programmed to read the letters in those image files. In my opinion it's really a question of when, rather than if, this is going to happen. In the spam arms race, clever coders are always at work trying to crack the latest obstacle to them launching an avalanche of spam (a spamalanche?). When the incentive is big enough - and the ability to comment on thousands of blogs for free is a pretty big incentive - someone's eventually going to figure out a way to do it. But for the time being, word verification should do the trick and stop most automated content spammers. So make sure it's switched on!

Key terms: word verification, verfication, verifcation, automated, comment, spam, script, software, spammers