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Abandoning SCode CAPTCHAs
The CAPTCHA experiment was a failure. I didn’t get any blog spam, but I heard from a few people who tried to post comments and failed (other’s succeeded). In the end, I didn’t feel like debugging it, or worse driving people away, so I determined to abandon it.
Still, I need a way to combat comment spam, so I went to a simpler, text-based CAPTCHA. This isn’t as flexible as I’d like, but it’s likely to do the trick. The main problem with it is having to edit code. When I update MT, I’ll have to reinstall it. Of course, that’s not the first time I’ve done that.
If you use this solution with MT 3 or above, you’ll find that Six Apart changed how comment fields are generated in the system templates, making it impossible to add the spam text field. To fix this, use this replacement for <MTCommentFields>. This has the added benefit of putting the new spam text input field in just one place so that you can edit it more easily if needed.
Posted by windley on June 29, 2006 3:47 PM
Comment from Leo Notenboom at June 29, 2006 6:11 PM
Why use a Captcha at all?
http://mttips.com/dealing_with_comment_spam.html
This has been working well for me for nearly a year, if not over, on my fairly busy main site.
Comment from Phil Windley at June 29, 2006 6:52 PM
That's a nice solution.
Comment from Peter Abilla at June 29, 2006 9:48 PM
Phil,
I was spung (is that a word?) many times last week; I posted about it here:
http://www.shmula.com/121/spings-attack-shmula
I installed Akismet and a Mathematics Captcha. Then, voila -- no more spam.
Pete Abilla
www.shmula.com
Comment from Richard K Miller at June 30, 2006 2:18 PM
I've found Akismet to be very effective on my WordPress blogs, and they now have a MT plugin:
http://akismet.com/mt-akismet-1.02.zip
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