November 2nd, 2004
The ever escalating arms war against Comment Spammers
Alas – I’ve got bored (strangely) of wading through tens of comment authorisations every day – each of which is a variation on poker, fake pharmaceuticals and pr0n.
So I’ve added a turing test to the comments – a CAPTCHA.
Here’s where it came from.
There are accessibility issues with the CAPTCHA – because it can exclude partially-sighted or blind readers – but I hope it’s not a permanent solution. (I hoping that Kitten’s captcha for the blind will become an official WordPress Plug-in soon.)
It’s sad – because it’s another barrier to posting (even though it’s not too difficult) – but I’m hoping it’ll work (at least in the short term.)
Banky says:
Jus’ checkin’ how difficult it is for me… being partially blind and all from wORking my way across America.
November 2nd, 2004 at 2:39 pm
Diggory says:
Cool – to works, even with your feeble eyesight
– and haven’t yet had to delete any filthy, filthy spam.
November 2nd, 2004 at 3:25 pm
Dave says:
I’ll give you filthy spam.
November 2nd, 2004 at 4:26 pm
tomp says:
I have a wordpress instalation that i never use on my server and that’s started getting comment spam recently. I’m wondering if somethign as simple as renaming all my form fields might sort this out.
My rationale being that I never had any problem with my blosxom comments because the format of the form wasn’t common enough to be picked as a target by the spambots creators, so if I obfuscate the WP form it will be similarly invisible.
generally speaking ; spammers, how do they sleep at night?
also, i thought the lowercase l’s in your captcha’s font were 1’s
November 2nd, 2004 at 5:04 pm
tomp says:
I just tried to wrote a comment but it failed to appear, despite my perfect eyesight, it was really interesting and insightful too.
November 2nd, 2004 at 5:41 pm
Diggory says:
Tom – I’ve currently got a belt and braces system with the CAPTCHA system and then manual moderation afterwards.
I may well disable the moderation if the CAPTCHA continues working as well as it has been.
I too fell foul of the 1/l problem – but thankfully there is a bit of a hint if you get it wrong.
I suspect that renaming the fields could well work – but could become a real headache when updates come.
November 2nd, 2004 at 6:41 pm
Gudlyf says:
You might want to check out the latest version I put out of AuthImage, as it now includes the option of displaying “phonetic-English” text instead of an image
November 4th, 2004 at 9:24 pm
Diggory says:
Wow a comment from the author – thanks for the hack – it’s great.
I think I’ve got the latest version.
November 4th, 2004 at 11:26 pm
Pooh Bah says:
Thank you captain obvious!
May 5th, 2007 at 3:47 am