It did work fine for a few months, but lately there has been a rash of spam comments and the filters haven't caught up yet. I considered my options:
- Spammers gonna spam. Just let it be and hand-delete the comments every so often. That seemed OK when it was one or two a week, but ignoring the problem hasn't seemed to make it go away.
- Limit comments to people with Google accounts. A large portion of the spam content, though not all, was anonymous. Requiring a Google login gets rid of that, at the cost of making anyone who really wants to post anonymously here put together a fake account. Like, um, a spammer would.
- Turn CAPTCHA back on and go back to the inconvenience that entails.
- Turn on moderation and review comments by hand. Comments would not show up until I happened to check through them, which would probably be somewhat more often than I actually post.
For now, I'm trying the second option. If you want to post a comment, you'll have to be logged in to your Google account, but that doesn't seem like a showstopper. Almost all of the legitimate comments here are from logged-in users. Again, if you feel the need to post anonymously, I'm sure you'll know what to do.
If that doesn't at least keep it down to a dull roar, I'll probably go with moderated comments. Re-instating CAPTCHA would be a last resort.
