Despite the questionable drawbacks of CAPTCHA, I find it very useful in killing comment SPAM.

For the last few months my blog has been bombarded by SPAM bots trying to leave marks of their clients’ sites so they can improve their Google PR. It frustrated me for some time as they continue to find new ways around the countermeasures that come packaged with WordPress. A few of the recommended plugins found on the WordPress Support Forums seemed promising, but one encounter with SPAM Karma pissed me off as it mistakenly passed me as a bot at Chris J Davis’ site and trashed my comment. It’s smart but if it outsmarts itself, it’s NO good! Comment moderation on the other hand was a bitch, for if you get hundreds of SPAM comments it would equate to massive inbox SPAMMING. It wasn’t until I learned about CAPTCHA when I finally found a near-perfect solution to my SPAM problem. Sure the bots can have built-in OCR mechanism one day, but until that day comes and AI finally manages to infiltrate the human ways I can lay back and relax knowing that no bot could SPAM my blog with their stupid ad comments for a while.

Now the breakdown…

A CAPTCHA test is a program that can generate and grade tests that:

• Most humans can pass
• Current computer programs can’t pass

For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below but current computer programs can’t:

The Wordpress plugin I’m using now is Trencaspammers by Coffelius and it generates a CAPTCHA test that looks like this:

You can see it at work in my comments page, and so far it has eliminated every single SPAM bot that comes accross my blog.

If you’re Spanish language challenged Esther has a translation of the install instructions on her site.

Credit: The CAPTCHA Project is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. It is funded by the NSF Aladdin Center.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 29th, 2004 at 1:45pm and is filed under domain, wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.