So after numerous complaints I have taken off the Captcha codes. For those who felt your complaints fell on deaf ears, they didn’t. I just personally am not terribly bothered by them in other blogs, and like the idea that robots can’t play at my blog.
Still I still have Akismet running so after several hours with the Captcha codes off friendly comments are still flowing, but the spam-trap was simply brimming with random crap. That wasn’t an issue as I just dumped the whole thing.
Let me know if you find your comments disappearing by shooting me an email at WEERDBEARD at GMAIL (you know the rest). I’ll probably ask you to submit one more comment then go look for it in the spam trap to tell Akismet you’re cool.
In celebration of the change have a duck
http://imgur.com/gallery/q79wXSH
AWESOME!!!
I don’t know if it works the same for self-hosted WordPress blogs, but on mine I have the option to make it so the first comment from a person is moderated but after I approve them they’re in the system and have free reign. I personally think it’s as good as it gets, but then, I don’t have as many commenters as you.
One thing I’ve found super useful is the Conditional Captcha plugin.
It’s pretty clever: comments that Akismet thinks are *not* spam are handled normally (either posted immediately, queued for moderation, etc. — however you have things setup). Such commenters don’t see captchas.
However, if Akismet thinks the comment *is* spam, then the commenter sees a captcha. If the captcha is solved correctly, you can choose what happens: either it’s posted immediately or queued for moderation. If the commenter fails the captcha, you can either delete the message entirely so it doesn’t fill up your spam folder or you can have it drop into the spam folder as usual. In my case, I have it get deleted.
I like the setup, since it keeps normal, non-spammy users happy because they don’t see captchas (unless their message is particularly suspicious, but that is quite uncommon) and it keeps me happy from having to deal with the zillions of spam postings.
WOW! Thanks for letting me know! I just installed it, and it REALLY looks like sweet technology. Right now things are no different, failed captcha goes to the spam trap, but I may change that to trash.
Also from the look at the test codes I viewed when setting it up the captcha codes are a little easier to solve than the visual noise ones I’m used to. That should help some of my readers who’s eyesight isn’t what it used to be!