disabling anon comments on LJ

[ratcreature]

I've decided to disable comments from non-registered users on LJ, because I've had to delete spam comments all the time, even though I had screening and since January also captcha enabled for anon comments. It's no use. On both DW and IJ anonymous commenting is still possible, because spam there isn't as bad.

Comments

[astridv]

I'm having the same problem. I figured it's the result of daily posting: daily spam. I just don't get, there are so many hoops they have to jump through, only to leave a comment that they have to know will be deleted instead of unscreened. Unless it's a bot, but how does a bot get past the captcha?

I hadn't thought of disabling anon completely but maybe that's not a bad idea. I get very few anon comments that aren't spam anyway. I'll give it a few more days and if it doesn't get better I'll do the same.

[eta: oh, your're right, they can still comment on DW. I hadn't thought of that. Spammers, be banned!]

[ratcreature]

I have no idea why spammers do that. It really seems to have no gain. As to the captcha, I assume either the one LJ uses is among the broken systems, or the spam bot network outsources the captcha entry to humans networked into it, who get a stream of captchas they enter. I've heard that some spammers and such actually pay humans to do captcha responses, with a pittance paid per answer of course (according to wikipedia $0.80 per thousand captcha answers), but I guess if you are impoverished in Bangladesh somewhere it's an option for income. Another way is to have your bot copy the image and use the same captcha somewhere else, e.g. on an infected computer or site or the like, where another human solves it in a captcha situation without knowing that they work for spammers.

[astridv]

or the spam bot network outsources the captcha entry to humans networked into it, who get a stream of captchas they enter.

Ugh. I hadn't even thought of that possibility but I suppose it makes "sense", in a perverted way.