TypePad breaks CAPTCHA- massive comment spam ensues
I should formalize my earlier report about our problem with comment spam since I have a little more information about it and I am hearing from other TypePad bloggers who are also affected. Last Friday TypePad apparently made changes to the CAPTCHA feature that up until that point had been very effective in eliminating comment spam. The changes they made broke CAPTCHA so that even if it is turned on in the settings it doesn’t work nor does it appear when someone posts a comment. It didn’t take spammers very long to realize this as we immediately began getting hit with 100s of spam comments, and I’ve spent a great amount of time this weekend dealing with them all. The latest word from the TypePad support folks is to see how it goes after the weekend so I’m hoping that means they are fixing it. I sure wish they would just roll back the changes they made that broke CAPTCHA, but apparently that must not be an option. I can’t think of any other reason they would subject the massive number of TypePad blogs to what must be millions of comment spam messages when they already had a good system to trap it.
If it ain’t broke and all that…
The lack of any public message from TypePad has been disappointing, I thought they’d got over that after the roasting they got from users when sites went offline a year or two back.
I’m thinking things are improving as I’ve not had any spam come through in the last few hours.
CAPTCHA is now working again! Yahoo! The preceding was an expression of enjoyment and not an infringement of any trademarks nor logos of Yahoo!