Confirm You Are Not a Spammer – Seriously?
I’m seeing this plugin in LOTS of blogs that I’m reading and commenting to and I wasn’t really that much concerned about it, initially. However when I started commenting again on lots of blogs as part of my back to blogging tasks, I started getting annoyed with this plugin. Why is that so?
Confirm you are not a spammer
What I’m talking about is this plugin called Anti-Spambot created by GrowMap and Andy w/c are people that I know and respect a lot. The way this plugin works is that there’s a checkbox in a comment form and before you can submit your comment, you will need to tick the checkbox to indeed confirm that you are not a spammer. How much sense does that make?
Well its not really that much of a big deal for me actually. I just find that its a workflow killer. I mean, you’re typing comments and doing this and that and when you click submit, you will get this notice that you have to confirm. Not that its annoying but it just gives me the ‘wtf’ look on my face. It doesn’t reload the page either so your comment will still be there but I guess its just human nature to get the ‘what’ look when you submit something and it doesn’t get submitted immediately. lols.
The other side
I haven’t tried the plugin yet so I haven’t had a chance to see what’s behind it yet. However from a bloggers perspective, I can’t really see much the value of it. I mean, what makes it different from a captcha? It requires you to do a thing before submitting your comment. Is it not making it hard for your reader to do commenting? Or maybe its just being lazy to moderate comments all in all?
If you’re reading this blog for a while you know that I value comments a lot and that I make it easy for people to interact (I always ask for their take, whatnot). With that I’m thinking having this ‘confirm you’re not a spammer’ box will only give your readers a step more before they can do what they want to do. And that maybe there’s a conversion part there that gets unconverted instead.
But again that’s just my opinion. Or maybe is there something that I misunderstood with regards to the plugin? Is Akismet not enough?
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September 14th, 2011 at 12:00
Hi,
I’m surprised that checking the box seems to a major issue. We tried captchas but the first day three of our regular commentators had problems with them. Checking the box only takes a second and if the blogs you frequent are all using it you don’t forget so you don’t see that warning message.
When your blog gets really popular and gets 1000+ comments a day and it takes you almost two hours to moderate your comments because Akismet threw over a dozen of your very best comments from regularly commentators into the spam folder along with 940 spam comments you’ll know why you see this plugin all over.
For every 1000 comments left in GrowMap, ~940 of them were generated by spambots. Now I know all my real comments are getting approved and it only takes fifteen minutes or so to delete the spam left manually.
Compared to any other solution this one simply works best. You’ll see tweets recommending it all the time and bloggers writing reviews and testimonials.
October 23rd, 2011 at 9:13
The plugin you are talking about is “GASP”.
GASP works by adding a check box that a commenter has to check before the comment can be submitted. Next to the checkbox is a short message “Confirm you are NOT a spammer.” There is a hidden email field in GASP which also prevents spam bots.
GASP is valuable plugin in avoiding spam.
December 1st, 2011 at 21:48
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