Comment Moderation, reCAPTCHA, Spam, and You

I was surprised to find the other day that my new blog already had comments. The comments turned out to be spam, and I deleted them right away. Thankfully, I have already turned on comment moderation, which means all comments must be approved by me before being shown to other users. I imagine if the site were to grow, comment moderation would become a chore, but for now, it is a small price to pay to keep the site looking clean.

A few days after setting up my blog, I added the drupal module for reCAPTCHA. This requires all commenters to type the characters in a distored image in order to cut down on automated posts by bots.

I admit, I was a little surprised at getting spam already, despite having only 2 posts and telling no one about the existance of this yet. Other than linking my website on my LinkedIn and StackExchange accounts, this website is new and unlisted. It is interesting, therefore, how quickly bots can parse other websites, detect a blog, and post their ads so efficiently. If I didn't hate spam so much, I'd give them props.