Sunday, December 16, 2012

Threats to your Blog

One of the biggest threats to your blog today is spam.  The urban dictionary defines spammer as a clever, diabolical person who gets free non-stop advertisement across the globe in millions of people’s electronic mail boxes. [1]

But, spamming is not limited to just your mailbox. The Comments section of your blog makes it high susceptible to spammers. There is a way to protect your blog from spamming; but be aware these are just temporary roadblocks.   

CAPTCHA is a test used to tell the difference between human and Computers and do it automatically. This is a CAPTCHA:



CAPTCHA is the acronyms for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".

It’s used throughout the computing environments to prevent automatic posts to a blog or website. 

CAPTCHA has evolved over time and most CAPTCHA today use a combination of letters and numbers that not a human could decipher. The CAPTCHA prevents “computer bots”, spammer and automated posting to websites such as Wikis and blogs.

The CAPTCHA is nothing more than HyperText Markup language (HTML) coding added to a webpage to create the CAPTCHA. 

I put my first webpage on line in 1995. Back then the term CAPTCHA had not been coined. It was coined, by 4 men in 2000, at the Carnegie-Mellon University.

The biggest problem of that day was the right click and saving of images from webpage. Thus was born the “No Right Click” HTML code to prevent this. No Right Click is still in used today and yes the theft of webpage content is not something new. However, the blazing theft of an entire website and its content,  as in the case Thomas MacEntee’s GeneaBlogger site and others in the blogging community, is new. 

If you are interested in using a CAPTCHA; you can get a free CAPTCHA by visiting captcha.net.

CAPTCHA for Blogger comments are integrated into the Blogger platform and can be implemented by selecting "Show Word Verification for Comments" on your Blogger Dashboard > Settings > Posts & Comments.  I would also mark ALWAYS under "Comment Moderation" while on this page. That way nothing gets posted to your Blog without your approval. 

If you are using BLOGGER as the platform for you web blog I would suggest that you protect posting to the comments section of your blog just for the many reasons stated above. I’m getting some spam comments on my blog and they never get posted because I moderate and delete them before they can be posted.

One of my biggest “pet peeve” about CAPTCHA is the inability to read a lot of the letters/numerals used currently in these web generated CATCHA.

There's a new trend in CAPTCHA that is awesome and I'm looking forward to the day that the alpha letters/numbers disappears and this new captcha takes their place. 

This new trend is called image puzzle captcha. With the new image puzzle captcha you move several pieces around to solve a problem. Most puzzles consist of 4 distinct puzzle pieces. The pieces are larger than letters/numbers and much easier on an “old man” eyes and nerves. 





While these procedures will not prevent you from receiving spam; with the “moderation required” block checked, they do put all  all  Comments  into a holding area for your review. Then you will be able to weed out the good stuff  from other meaningless, unwarranted, unsolicited comments

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