Captcha – What Is It, and How To Get Rid Of It

You go to leave a comment on a blog, and you’re confronted by the dreaded jumble of words.

Captcha’s. The bane of every bloggers commenting life. Many bloggers install this on their sites, to protect themselves from silly amounts of spam comments, but what they might not realise is that it can be quite off-putting to the commenters who want to leave you a little message.

Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (A Turing test is a way of testing a machines ability to show intelligent behaviour – can it pass as a human? A Captcha is the reverse of a Turing test – can you prove you’re human?)

What you might not realise is that Blogger turns this feature on automatically. You may have been losing tons of comments without even knowing it!

Here’s how to get rid of them:

Head to the Posts and Comments section in your Blogger dashboard:

Change “Show word verification” to “no”. That’s it! Super easy. If you’re worried about spamming, then change your comment moderation settings (which are just above the word verification setting) to either “always” (so you’ll need to manually approve everything) or “sometimes” (where you’ll have to approve comments on any post older than a certain amount of days that you set)

In WordPress, Captcha is a user added feature, so you would just need to disable the relevant plugin.