CAPTCHAs rock!

Floating
The CAPTCHAs seem to be working really well. I haven’t had a single piece of comment spam since I installed it, and several “real” people have been able to leave cool comments (so we’re not keeping the good people out). It’s a little weird to not have all the spam coming in; it’s a bit like having an annoying buzz disappear and finding that the silence seems a little off at first.

Thanks to Gudlyf for the nifty plugin! There are a few interface bits that I’d like to change if I had a few minutes, but I suspect they won’t bug me enough for me to ever get to them, and the basic system works really well. My mail spool is very grateful :-).

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We have CAPTCHAs! (I think)

CAPTCHA sample
First, my apologies for the lengthy silence. Things have been very busy, and I wiped out pretty hard on my bike two weeks ago (all is well now…more later…maybe?) and that slowed a lot of things down at a time when I really couldn’t much afford it. Sigh.

The happy news is that in a fit of frustration (1 real comment buried in over 120 spam comments) I actually installed a CAPTCHA plugin as I threatened some time back. After what was probably not enough time looking at options, I went with Gudlyf’s AuthImage plugin. It wasn’t too hard to install, although I had to modify two theme files and one “backend” file, which could definitely be a problem when upgrading WordPress or switching themes.

People should let me know if this causes them any problems. I definitely want to annoy spammers, but not the kind folks that take the time to visit in earnest. (If you can’t post here, e-mail me at “phi AT unhinderedbytalent.com”.)

This is particularly cool because Nick Hopper (friend and nifty UMM alum) was a co-author (while at CMU) of the paper that first introduced the idea of CAPTCHAs. (See his page for a link to a copy.)

Currently listening to: The wonderful “You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go” by Madeleine Peyroux from Careless love.

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