Using Captcha
I was hoping that the comment spam would disappear, or at least be blocked better by CS 2.0, but it appears that the people who have been targeting my site pretty much do a lot to avoid the SPAM rules that CS has built into it. They post a single comment about once an hour or so, it only contains a single link, and has no real keyword I can use to block them unless I want to keep people from using the word ‘hotel’.
In order to stop having to deal with the spam I’ve implemented Captcha via the excellent CS companion assembly from Timothy Humphrey. You can check out his code and CS utilities here.
I found this via a search of the CS forums (this thread). The other one I found (in the downloads section from Community Server) requires you to change code and recompile, while the one from Timothy is simply add a few files and then update the pages/controls you want the captcha control to appear on and it just works. The thread was interesting because it talked about why some people will not use Captcha. I get so frequent comments and contacts I don’t see it as a big deal to ask people to enter three digits in another field. It saves me from everyday having to delete comments, or worse, put all comments into a moderated queue.