So I kind of took a way too long extended break from my blog. I’ve been working hard on our product sites, in particular oClubhouse.com which provides high quality CMS websites for Associations, Membership Clubs, and Organizations. It’s really a fun product and I know that our new customers are gonna love it. It really puts alot of emphasis on making websites work for membership clubs with just enough bells and whistles to grab them new members, and leverage the social web to keep their current members hooked, while not providing so much to get overwhealming for people. It’s a delicate balance.
We’re making a few other products as well, in particular oFitnessclub.com for Fitness clubs, Athletic clubs and gyms which is pretty cool, as well as oDaycare.com which I’m even more excited about. The ROI with oDaycare.com is pretty crazy. Any Daycare that has open spots and isn’t using oDaycare.com is missing out on money. For less than the cost of one student a month (alot less) they can really provide an extra level of service for their parents, as well as bring in tons of business.
Anyway that’s another blog.
This one is Captcha Captcha Captcha.
So as I said, I was being a bad social marketer and ignoring my blog. Well I come back after a couple of weeks and I have 179 comments. SPAM. Porn spam, handbag spam, bad english me like post and bookmark very informative i read again SPAM.
delete, delete, delete, delete, delete….
I can’t believe I didn’t install a captcha in this WordPress install. Talk about forgetting something major.
Captchas are those images or math problems or things you have to listen to in order to post in certain places. For instance if you try to post a comment on my blog here after your name and message it’ll have this picture of numbers and letters and you have to put them in a box. I’m sure you’ve seen them all over the internet.
The reason for them is that they, for the most part, prevent non-humans from posting spam. Computers have a hard time reading the images and figuring out what they’re saying, where the human eye does not. Of course they’re getting better, or some people hire cheap Chinese day labor, but still you’ll prevent a ton of spam posts from even going through.
I didn’t have one on. Big mistake. Everyone needs to use captcha. Sure it can sometimes be a little bit annoying for the user, but it’s worth it in the long run. Most Captchas are very inconspicuous and take a second or two to complete, and they clean up the internet for you and for me.
I can’t believe I forgot to put one on in the first place.
Ah well I hope this one works. I’m using the SI Captcha Ant-Spam plugin for wordpress which for some reason is hosted on a Long Beach weather website. That troubles me somewhat, but what can you do.
Every site that takes submissions or registers users should use captcha. It’ll save you the headache of deleting 179 spam emails when you go away for a couple weeks.