How I Just Broke a Choke Hold

One joy of Blogging about your favorite subject is when your loyal readers leave you Comments — especially when they share additional information on a topic, or link you to a related source, or just agree and express appreciation. Even if they want to dispute your ideas or argue over which wrestler is sexier, it’s still fun to have discourse on a subject you love and hear other opinions — really just to know some other human is out there reading and reacting to your bullshit.

Anyway, for the past several years, this Blog has been under attack: Spam Bots have been choking my Comment box with hundreds of advertisements per week. It was mostly drug companies pushing their pharmaceuticals (damn you to hell, Sackler family!), but I also heard from plenty of other hucksters and even foreign language Bots that probably were not commenting on rasslin as far as I could tell.

So I tried two solutions to deal with the Bots and their relentless 24/7 spamming:

1. Spend about a half hour per day culling through my Comments to remove the Spam and preserve the real responses posted by human beings (thanks guys!); and
2. Turning off the ability to leave Comments on each article after a week or so (sorry guys!)

My first solution was time-consuming — I’d damn sure rather spend my leisure time watching and writing about rasslin than clearing old Spam. My second solution was disappointing for both you and me, because I’m sure you’ve had interesting things to say about old posts, which I’d love to read, but the Comments had already been shut down to block the Bots.

So I was bitching recently about the Spam Bots in an email to one of my loyal readers, and he goes:

It sucks that you have to deal with all those bots though. Maybe you could use some sort of captcha to automatically filter them out?

And I’m like, Wait, can I do that in WordPress? I don’t know how. Maybe I can figure it out. I mean, I’ve seen those Captchas for years on other websites, where you must re-type some crazy scrambled letters, or click the boxes containing bicycles, or just check off that you are Not A Robot. It’s like my brain couldn’t fathom trying to ever set this up on this blog until my reader asked me that simple question.

So I did it. I just figured it out. It took a little while — you gotta register your website with Google to obtain a Public Key and Private Key, and at first it didn’t like my domain name or something — but I figured it out!

So you’ll now see one of those “not a robot” checkboxes in my Comments section. That’s it.

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That was all it took! It’s been a few hours now and not one Spam comment! Wow, I think I’m gonna go back and edit my past 20 or 30 posts to open up the comments again, just in case anybody had something to say. If you’ve seen any recent articles you’ve wanted to comment on, go for it. I welcome your input and I don’t think the Bots can have at me any more.

By the way, in honor of my escape from the Bots and their relentless Spam attacks over the past many years, I pulled up an old Choke Hold collection — some really vintage pics from fairly deep in my archives — from a folder I haven’t opened in years. I felt these classic images of cheaters cruelly strangling their helpless Baby-Faces seemed somehow appropriate for this article.