More Comment Spam and What to do with it

so it seems that google recapture is not enough to stop the spammers on a custom comments system, which is really quite annoying. 

I have recapture and also checking if its verified and then i have a approved or not toggle on the comments, and the bot or person has somehow figured out that you can send back the approved flag and set it to true as well. 

so they are getting free non linked backlinks, as the content of the comment does not allow any tags luckily, but still its annoying. 

so basically i have to just run this command every few days, to clear out the spam, and look through manually to see if any of the comments are actually real. 

check first if there is any legit comments
select * from comments where id > 6072

then delete them
delete from comments where id > 6072

even the ip addresses are randomised, and i cant delete comments based on if they are approved or not, so ill have to rethink the comment system maybe. 

do i use a plugin that handles comments externally, or facebook comments, or try some other kind of comment system? or just disable comments. 

Update: 18 Oct 2022

Disqus or Discuss, or whatever its called looks a bit meh... It has a "dark mode" but it does not work.

Maybe ill try another comment plugin that is less annoying and massive. Its basically just an iframe anyway it seems. 

Thanks for iframing in your content and masking it as a "javascript embed" well actually, a javascript embed thats just adding an iframe is a bit lazy isnt it?

I guess i should keep looking. 

19 Oct 2022

Thinking about this again, its actually annoying me a bit...

So bad looking and iframe, you cant get more annoying than that in a comment system surely, well except for excess spam. 

I think i will just disable comments for now. until i can think of a better system.