As I said in my previous post, I have a lot of work to do on this poor, old, neglected site. One thing I didn’t anticipate was having to install something to help prevent spam comments on my posts.

If you try to post a comment, you’ll be asked to verify that you’re not a robot. I apologize for this, but this poor, forgotten blog that doesn’t have a valid SSL site at the moment got 7 spam comments in less than 24 hours.

I’m glad that at least Russia still loves me!

So I installed the noCaptcha plugin, got keys for Google’s reCaptcha system (version 2), and now you’ll have to verify that you’re not a robot before you can post a comment.

I’ll work on that SSL certificate. In the interim, in spite of Google’s insistence that the site isn’t “safe”, it is. “Safe” is kind of arbitrary and open to interpretation but I don’t ask for your personal information, I’m not selling anything (yet), and short of you putting your full name, Social Security number, your mother’s maiden name, and a dump of your password manager into a comment, it’s safe*.

But those spam comments? Do links stuffed into a WordPress comment still do anything beyond wasting the poster’s time (I get it, it’s all automated) and annoying the site owner (I choose to not get annoyed, I just look for solutions).

* If you should post this information here, I’ll delete the comment without saving it anywhere; I won’t approve it. I’ll probably also send you an email to tell you that what you did isn’t a good idea.