A Foolish Manifesto
fREWdiculous!
reCAPTCHA
Author: fREW Schmidt24 Aug
Normally I opt to eschew metablog post (how meta is that?!) but I figured this deserves a brief explanation.
I have been getting more and more spam lately. Fortunately Akismet usually keeps humans from seeing it, but Akismet has also kept back plenty of spam too. So I decided to go with the more powerful reCAPTCHA for comments from now on. I know it’s a hassle, but it could be worse. There are lots of bad CAPTCHA plugins out there and in general I like the reCAPTCHA concept. Anyway, sorry!
4 Responses for "reCAPTCHA"
Hi Frew,
Assuming this is WordPress, have you looked at WP-Hashcash?
To quote their site: “It works because your visitors must use obfuscated javascript to submit a proof-of-work that indicates they opened your website in a web browser, not a robot”
The neat thing is that it’s the browser (the javascript code) being made to work, not the commenter.
Not sure how easy it would be to setup for your blog, but have you looked at Mollom (http://mollom.com)? It’s a service that analyzes the content of comments and only if it considers it potentially spam will it show a captcha.
Nice and easy for humans, but hard for spambots. And it’s free for small sites.
I’m glad you’re using reCAPTCHA! I think it’s such a brilliant idea. Then again I read a lot, so maybe that’s just the book nerd in me speaking.
@Dotan: I considered a few of those type plugins. I don’t really have a good reason not to use them, so maybe I’ll take the plunge and do it.
@Michael: I’m already using Akismet which takes care of most of the spam, but not quite all. It had a few false positives for mst (something that apparently happens to him often) but in general it works well. I turned it off last night and this morning had 27 spam messages. I guess the spammers can get through reCAPTCHA?
@Colin: agreed! I use reCAPTCHA on my super-secret project at home and it seems to work perfectly.
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