Thinking of trying CAPTCHAs

I just had to deal with an even 100 (!) spam comments posted to this weblog, mostly for medications promising endless nights of passion and fullfillment. At least that’s a nice change from my e-mail spam, which has recently focussed on variants on the classic Nigerian oil scam.

Thanks to some of the new features in WordPress 1.5 it wasn’t terribly difficult to do, but it’s still a pain and certainly annoys. There’s a WordPress plugin for CAPTCHAs that I should look into. (CAPTCHAs are the weird graphics that some sites use to ensure that you’re a real person. They have letters in strange shapes and angles that are semi-difficult to recognize automagically. See a pharyngula comment page for an example of this.) But updating our blogs to 1.5.1 will have to come first and blah and blah and blah…

Spam sucks.

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2 thoughts on “Thinking of trying CAPTCHAs”

  1. CAPTCHAs work very, very well — I haven’t had any comment spam in months, since I enabled them. Then I had to disable them recently because of some bugs in the implementation, and got a half-dozen spams in the first day.

  2. Thanks for the feedback. No new evil spam today, but I’m sure there’ll be another wave soon enough. At the moment there are other issues distracting me from blog maintenance, but in a few weeks it’ll definitely be on the list.

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