Currently, the process of getting your comment out of Akismet’s queue, often put there because someone(s) submitted as comment spam or you used a keyword combination that triggered a reaction, is to find it and remove it. If you think it has been caught, ask bloggers whom you’ve commented on to search their queue and mark it as NOT SPAM.

I think it would be nice to get a notification, but then they’d have to notify EVERYONE in the queue, including comment spammers. That’s a lot of work.

A message to the blogger is a nice idea for if the comment doesn’t not appear. Want to write the Plugin for that? :D

A simple ‘Click here if your comment hasn’t appeared!’ message after posting would help a lot, making it easy for people to seek help. I get people who find my contact page and let me know anyway, but I’d imagine many either get confused and run away, or try to post it again thinking there was an error.

For the time being I just have a ‘If your comment doesn’t appear immediately after posting, please use the comment restoration form’ message below the comment submit button and hope people will see it. The form is naturally a simply contact form that asks almost nothing of the user beyond a name (and even that isn’t necessary — the time of the submission is enough so that I know to look into the spam tray and reveal it).

A lot of people could very happily get on with an easy-to-read unique CAPTCHA if their blog is one of the less popular ones, which of course comprises a huge amount of blogs. The fact that an unbroken CAPTCHA essentially eliminates comment spam also reduces moderation workload significantly, thus making them more suitable to those with little time to dedicate to moderation.

I’m only really making sure there’s another perspective to this, because a CAPTCHA could be more appropriate for some people based on their specific circumstances. I’ve seen several blogs (including one of my own) receiving many thousands of visits and dozens of comments per month, and thanks to their unique CAPTCHAs the spam throughput was almost non-existent.

Probably worth noting is that I no longer use CAPTCHAs myself. I do believe the comment submission process should be as easy for users as possible, even if it does burden blog authors more. But not everyone is like me and takes their blog so seriously they’re prepared to sift through comments checking for false positives every day. I think the “Using CAPTCHAs is evil!” tone of this article is slightly too hard on such people.

Theoretical possibility? No, it’s a fact. Akismet and the rest do the best they can with what they have. Since their data is reliant upon their own data, research, and information they collect from others, there will be problems along the way as people report legitimate comments as spam and others remove spam comments from the queue. It’s the nature of a collaborative method. But it works great even with those issues to deal with.

I use Auntie Akismet Spam Greasemonkey Script for Firebox which is a FireFox script, not a Plugin, and it saves me an incredible amount of time for processing the Akismet spam list. I love it.

As for the two positive aspects you list, the article states that they do not eliminate comment moderation. Spammers know how to break through, so comment moderation remains a choice. As for the last, unique systems are great claims, but I’ve seen them broken in minutes. There are only so many ways to come up with a unique system, and if you spread it across multiple sites and make it available to the public, it will be broken fast as it is no longer unique.

I’m sure someone will come up with some system that will bring back the CAPTCHA but until then, I vote we work as hard as possible to put attackers, sploggers, and spammers out of business before they reach the web more than stop them once they get on. That would be the perfect world, wouldn’t it? :D

I haven’t used Akismet in a while as several false positives worried me, plus I didn’t have the time to regularly dig through all the filtered comments and work out which if any were legitimate.

While I do believe CAPTCHAs are nearing the end of their life, it’s worth bearing in mind that they do have two positive aspects:

1. They virtually eliminate comment moderation for the blog author
2. If you use one unique to your site, it’s very unlikely to be broken and at the very least will last several months

Spammers are getting more and more sophisticated. We spend a lot of our time analyzing their behavior and let me tell you that they’re getting smart, very smart! We can’t rest on our laurels, we have to evolve with them.

1. Making sure you patrol like hell to remove wiki spam, delete articles created by spambots, and block robots from accessing special pages where you can see the history of early articles. Encourage contributors to patrol. Ban bot created accounts as soon as they are created. This is really time intensive.

2. Require that any one who edits verifies their e-mail address before editing. Still patrol because you’ll get human edited wiki spam or people who just can’t follow rules regarding content allowed on a wiki.

3. Capatchas in cases where people haven’t verified e-mail addresses.

One is kind of the ideal but really time and resource intensive. kei.ki does that. Two just has too many barriers to editing for a lot of people. If you want to just correct a spelling error (eror to error for example), then having to register, turn off. Blah.

No real solution to wikis unless you’re using wiki software that doesn’t have a high penetration rate in the wiki market where people have not created bots to use that software or they are protected from editing by shared passwords. (I believe the latter is the case for BarCamp’s PBWiki based wiki. You need the password to edit.)

And ouch. I had read that nofollow wasn’t used much but if it isn’t, why hasn’t that been depreciated as a feature on MediaWiki? (And that is digressing.)

As for “nofollow” it doesn’t work on anything, so it doesn’t matter if you have it turned on or not. It doesn’t hold weight any more as no one other than Google adopted it, and even they don’t take it seriously. A lot of stuff marked nofollow is indexed by Google. It might not get Page Rank, but if it can be found on a search, who cares.

I know its frustrating, but if CAPTCHAs aren’t working, then what do you use on a wiki? Not sure about that. Anyone?

The fact that spammers use mediawiki sites is particularly frustrating as the default for MediaWiki is ref=nofollow. (You can turn it off but considering the nature of wikis and what you could be looking to, it just doesn’t seem smart in terms of PageRank. ) There just doesn’t seem to be any inherent benefit to spamming wikis because of that.