Out of the SEO loop today

by DazzlinDonna 

So my Friday has been spent dealing with spammers. I have been inundated with learning more about ways spammers can use forms to send out old-fashioned spam email, as well as how to deal with blog spammers. In essence, the captcha system seems to be the best way to handle both types of spammers at this time, although there have been reports that even captcha systems cannot foil all spam attempts.

Not sure what a captcha system is? According to Wikipedia, a common type of captcha requires that the user type the letters of a distorted and/or obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. In other words, it is those little images that show letters and numbers all distorted and squiggly, and you have type in the correct characters to prove you are a human and not a bot.

So, for a Wordpress blog I have, I used AuthImage plugin. It took a while to get it all configured the way I wanted it (so that the words were readable), but all in all, it was a fairly smooth process.

For a custom coded site of mine, I had to roll my own captcha system. That took some effort! And frankly, this whole spam-stopping crusade has left me worn out. I would much rather have spent my time working on SEO. Ah well, perhaps tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve had some good learning experiences today, so it’s probably best that I had to go through with it.