Captcha Catches Crap

Akismet does a fine job.  In Amazing Akismet SPAM Fighting, I explained that with a simple WordPress plugin, I was saved from significant comment moderation from our fiends friends, the spammers.  Since that post, I’ve avoided thousands of SPAM hits, thanks to Akismet.

But that still requires an occasional review of the SPAM folder to 1) make sure there aren’t any false positives (and there really aren’t many!), and 2) to just clean it out.

Spammers (and their ‘bots) are relentless, so I decided to add another line of defense: CAPTCHA.

Wikipedia defines CAPTCHA as “a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.” Man, that is what we need to fight SPAM!

With CAPTCHA displays random characters in an odd, graphical manner, that prevents Internet ‘bots from reading them.  Humans can easily discern the characters, enter them into the box and continue.  In this case, allow a blog comment to be entered.

The term CAPTCHA means ”Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Follow the wiki link above for more about the science behind the magic.

There are many CAPTCHA plugins available for WordPress.  The I chose is SI CAPTCHA for WordPress.  I like the colors.  :-)

With this new defensive maneuver against SPAM, it comes with a thank you to all of The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit readers.  It does force you to enter a few extra characters to enter a comment, but it saves me considerable non-value added time.  I appreciate your indulgence.

Dave