Website infiltrated by bots
Birds of Ohio had become the latest victim of web bot spamming. Web bots are most simply put machines created to surf the internet and post many comments on websites full of nonsense. Basically, they are machines used to cause others alot of otherwise unecessary work. The eagle cam page was recently hit by a spam bot (aka web bot), and the machine left 21 comments filled with nonsense. The comments have now been removed. The only effective way to prevent spam bots from doing just what they were created to do... spam a website, is to insert a CAPTCHA field that must be filled with the correct answer or letter-number series before a comment is posted. CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. The CAPTCHA is usually a simple question, such as 'What is 2+2?'. The answer '4' must be entered in order for the comment or form to post or submit. Since spam bots fill in the forms with random nonsense, the probability that it will correctly enter the number '4' is very slim. And most CAPTCHA fields change after every submission or posting of the form/comment. But in order to keep my website easy to use for all of my viewers, I do not use the CAPTCHA fields except on the story and photo submission forms. For a simple comment one should not have to go through the process of using a CAPTCHA. But also I like to have a regular commenting platform as well as the Facebook platform, for two reasons. Number one, I want to encourage those with facebook to utilize my website through their social media page. But more importantly, as one who does not use Facebook, Twitter or any other social media website, I know the frustraion of not being able to fully use a webpage without having a social media page, and do not wish for the users of my website to go through the same frustration. It is almost as if people such as myself are being penalized for not using online social media websites. Since my website is more succeptible to spamming because of the above reasons, I ask that any user who happens to find a page that has been spammed report the find to me so that I can remove the spam. You can report such findings here. Thank you for your cooperation, and I apologize for any problems that this may have caused.