
245 - BATTLE SPAM IN YOUR BLOG
HaCK
# 98
Switching the comments settings for an individual post
If you decide that the moderated comments option is either taking up too much of your time, or
removing the feeling of real-time interaction in your blog’s comments, you might also want to just
get an email notication whenever a new comment is posted. This way, when someone posts a
spam comment to one of your posts, it will appear immediately but you will be alerted to it, and you
can then delete the comment via the Trash icon next to it.
To activate the notication option, go to the Settings→Comments page for your blog. Enter an email
in the bottom eld labeled Comment Notication Address and click Save Settings.
By default, your blog is also protected by so-called CAPTCHAs, images displaying characters that the
user is then required to type correctly into a box near the image, as shown in Figure 10-15. CAPTCHA
is short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” but
you can think of it simply as a way to “capture” bots, because they may not be able to understand
the image, and thus might fail at entering the correct letters. The letters in CAPTCHAs are usually
rather distorted to increase the barrier for those bots able to utilize Optical Character Recognition, so
sometimes ...