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Blog CAPTCHA
The last week or so I’ve been getting slammed by “Nice site” blog comment spam that just wants a link to some dubious Web site. I’d turned on “approval for everyone” but that just means that it doesn’t show up on the site—I still have to delete it and it got to be a pain.
In an effort to fight spam while keeping my site as open to feedback as possible, I’ve added a CAPTCHA to the comment page. The package I’m using is SCode (Movable Type). It’s not too sophisticated, but it works and I imagine it will ward off the big offenders for now.
The hardest part of installing it was getting the GD Library built. It’s got 4 or 5 dependencies and then I had a few other problems which were the result of stupidity on my part (using an older version of the library I had lying around). After that, it was as easy as installing and configuring most MT plugins.
As I was working on this, I began to think of a CAPTCHA as a very broad form of authentication—in this case letting people broadly identify themselves as “human.” That’s all I care about and so making people log in would be asking for too much specificity in their identity parameters.
Feel free to try it out.
Posted by windley on June 27, 2006 3:31 PM
Comment from Tom at June 28, 2006 3:28 PM
It's the bane of bloggers everywhere. I'm not a huge fan of CAPTCHAs, though. I'm rather in favor of simple text-only solutions, perhaps a simple question like "What is Phil Windley's last name?" You can likely even go so far as to use javascript to autopopulate the field.
So long as individual bloggers are just slightly different from the mainstream they're usually safe. Anyone who will go through the trouble to catch these minor anomolies will be just as likely to utilize one of the many CAPTCHA interpreters publicly available. And, it wouldn't have required that you install the GD library. :)
Oh, and using the "Preview" button triggers the post timeout, so posting immediately after a preview is prohibited!
Comment from Jo-Pete Nelson at July 4, 2006 11:35 PM
I've been getting attacked by that same "nice site" spammer. I had been blocking IPs (whoever it is usually hit with about 6 comments from the same IP at any given time), but then another less-savory spammer started commenting as well. Since I really don't want my mother to be reading about [fill in your choice of crude language], I changed all comments to be fully moderated. I don't get a heck of a lot of comments anyway, and I didn't have time to figure out some other method (I personally hate CAPTCHAs).
Comment from donate car at April 11, 2007 7:34 AM
Nice post !
Comment from Luciana at June 11, 2007 10:23 AM
Currently the best way to protect your website against spammers is using Asirra. But there's no way of protecting it against people that are getting paid to manually input the codes.
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