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VBC wants to know: Captcha or no captcha?

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Vampire Book ClubA few weeks ago, I removed the captcha feature from the comments section on VBC. If you’re not familiar with the terminology, it’s the wavy numbers or letters you have to enter to prove you’re not a spam robot. There had been significant talk on other blogs and Twitter about readers choosing not to comment because of the captcha validation. And I get that. I read blog posts on my phone occasionally, and entering that stuff on a mobile device is painful. However, it wasn’t really an issue we’d had here at VBC. Other bloggers touted the big influx in comments they received by removing the little code bit.

I’m very thankful we have such a strong, active community on Vampire Book Club. You are fun and have great insight into books and authors. I love reading your opinions on the books we review, the discussions on favorite characters, book recommendations and seeing you interact with your favorite authors here on the blog. So, I ditched the code, because I was worried people were being left out of our community. And I didn’t want that.

However, we haven’t had any more comments than usual, and it’s made quite a bit of work for me. I employ two spam filters on VBC. The first is the fantastic Askimet, which has caught 55,000 spam comments for me in the last year. THOUSANDS. It rules. The second is the built-in WordPress spam filter. Since removing the captcha feature on comments, I have between 200 and 250 comments in the WordPress filter each day. Two or three of those comments are legit. That means, each day I have to go through 10 or more pages of junk comments to make sure those wanting to participate here at VBC are heard.

So, here’s the question, readers: Do you care if VBC uses captcha in the comments? If it truly makes things easier for you, tell me and I will not reinstate captcha. However, if it doesn’t matter one way or another for you, tell me, too. Because when we start Alpha Showdown comments are going to quintuple here, and I want to make sure the extra work is worth it.

71 Responses to “VBC wants to know: Captcha or no captcha?”

  1. Sandy Lion says:

    Please no captcha- it bothers the bite out of me. I always mistake rn for m or r and t when connected to u and w to make me enter the damn words many, many times. Please take pity on my soul and keep it far, far, away.

  2. Amanda says:

    Words cannot even begin to describe how much I HATE CAPTCHA!! You will forever hold a place in my heart if you never, ever, ever use it again. 😉

  3. Shan AKA Preternatural Addict says:

    I’m not fussed. If using CAPTCHA means no spammers and no extra work for our awesome mods here at VBC then hey I’m all for it otherwise it’s not an issue 😀

  4. Book Huntress says:

    Bring it back if it means less work for you!!!

    I agree that at times it is difficult to see what a letter is, but just hit the refresh until you get one you can read, it doesn’t refresh the entire page, just that so it is not a big deal at all.

  5. Marcia Koehler says:

    Reinstate Cap. It doesn’t keep me from commenting and I don’t want to read the spam either. Love your blog!

  6. No Captcha! There are a ton of other plugins that you can use instead of Captcha. My favorite is from GrowMap. I talk about how wonderful it is briefly on my blog. Thanks for taking your readers’ opinions into consideration.

  7. Valerie says:

    doesn’t matter to me I would still comment either way

  8. Michelle L. says:

    I don’t mind Captcha because it’s just ReCaptcha (2 very muddled words) that I have trouble reading. It won’t stop me from commenting because it takes maybe 10 seconds to type in the word. But of course this would be different for other people. There’s a really cool and hilarious video where the one of the treaters of Captcha talks about Captcha, ReCaptcha, and a new program DuoLingo. I loved it; it amazed me. I thought Captcha and ReCaptcha were just for detecting spam. ReCaptcha though was a way of digitizing books with the help of online users. I never knew that and I would have hated ReCaptcha less if I knew this before.

    http://t.co/vztsIxFe

  9. wildchild1954 says:

    I am 58 with the beginnings of glaucoma – needless to say I really hate Captcha. I’m going to have little enough time left that I’ll be able to see clearly and I don’t want to waste any of it trying to figure our what the stupid letter is in a Captcha just to prove that I’m a human. It doesn’t always work anyway. I went through this with Bing games (before they quite) when every four games you had to do something to prove you were a human. Then when I won a prize they weren’t going to award it because they claimed I used a bot to play!

  10. Melanie says:

    No Captcha. It is difficult on my iPhone. Hard to read and then with autocorrect it you have to double check. Sometimes takes me several times to make a post. And by then, I say just forget it. So, please no Captcha.

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