Does CAPTCHA help commenters feel safe?

Personally although I might use cfformprotect if I maintained the code for my own blog (I don't, it's the riaforge copy of blogCFC that Ray maintains), I wouldn't use captcha either. For myself I'd prefer to use moderation and send comments to my own email with a link to either delete or approve in the email, so that my interface to the comments would be essentially all in the email. That would help on my end by reducing my maintenance overhead. As it is even with the captcha I still have to manually log in (to 2 different blogs even) and delete spam, which I do on a daily basis. Lately they've become pretty persistent and I've seen a given blog entry with 5-8 spam posts in spite of the captcha. Ray could of course make the captcha more complex (I think it's only 2-3 characters) but long captchas are problematic for the people who post. Fortunately I don't think there are many blind users wanting to post on my blogs, since it doesn't have an audio option.

I'm honestly not sure what people think of the captchas or lack thereof... I know that a number of people get upset when they see a captcha on MySpace (which I don't use, but Tiffany does). It may depend quite a bit on the group of users in question. Though my gut feeling is that people posting the comments are apt to be more annoyed by the captcha than they would be concerned about comment spam. But the only information I have to back that up is anecdotal.

From my perspective, I'm less likely to participate in Blogs that moderate. Partly because I am robbed of the Instant Gratification of my comment posting, and partly because in the past I've had perfectly good comments rejected just because the comment contradicted the blog owners article, I am less excited to post on moderated blogs. These days, I quite often abandon my comment and just don't bother.


Another downside of moderation is it slows down the conversation on blog articles. The comment conversation is where all the good bits are.....

I've used CFFormProtect for almost two years now and it has only given me one false positive - meaning a certain spam-mail would get through. Then I've had a couple of people complaining they couldn't comment - it was due to the very short comments and words used. But it has saved me from deleting thousands and thousands of spam-mails. My blog gets bitten my bots regularly and without the overhead of deleting spam I actually get things done ;-)

We use CFFormProtect in all our company websites as well for all the websites of our customers. Furthermore I push it everywhere I go and comment - especially if there's a CAPTCHA present. I really hate those darn things! Use CFFormProtect instead!

I also feel a certain short informative message would be appropriate for the "clean" and "naked" CFFormProtect forms, but I'd let every user of the functionality decide whether or not to implement this.

Sounds like most agree that getting spam from a blog is not really a big concern for most folks. I was thinking along the same lines, but I wanted to get your opinions as well. Thanks for the feedback!

By the way, I have had a few users lately say that they can't get CFFP to work for them, so I am glad to hear that so many people are having success with it. This leads me to believe that the problems others are having could be user (or implementer) error.

Pam,

Yes and no. The current version works fine, however I am on the verge of releasing version 2.0 with some bug fixes and a new version (I've integrated Project Honeypot, which I discussed in the CF meetup preso you watched). So if you have a pressing need, give it a try. If not, wait a couple of weeks and I'll have 2.0 ready.