This site is currently getting bombarded with spam. The Akismet filter is catching most of it, but the spam filters are filling up faster than I can review them. This means that the spammers appear to have figured out how to beat the math captcha. I’m not sure if I’ll be switching to a different captcha or simply removing the captcha entirely.
Either way, this means that if your comment hits my spam filter (i.e., doesn’t show up within 5 minutes of you hitting the “post” button) then it’s almost certainly been lost forever. This generally only happened about once every six months, so I’m not too worried about it. But I hate to see anyone take the time to write up a response to something and then have it disappear into the ether. Please e-mail me if you’re having persistent problems with a particular comment you want to make.
I’m also testing out a social sharing bar that will appear at the bottom of each post. What do you think?
I’d love buttons for giving you +1 or like even more. Even I have nothing to comment, I can give you a “thumbs up” for an article.
Assuming you are using WordPress, I recently added the plugin “Stop Spammer Registrations Plugin” to my blog and it seems to work very well. It stopped spam bots registering on my page instantly (they also figured out how to beat the captcha), stopped spam bbPress forum posts and surely is also able to filter comments, too. Seems like a pretty good plugin to have. It has mutliple methods of identifying spam.
Now I’m trying a less-intrusive bar, but I think I’d prefer the +1 and likes, too. Unfortunately, the Shareaholic plug-in I’m using doesn’t seem to let you use those unless you’re using the larger “sexy” icons. (And, ironically, the two don’t mix stylistically at all.)
And I’m trying out a recommendation bar at the bottom of posts. But that may not last long if it can’t figure out how to display meaningful titles for the posts.