Blog spam: solved

Friday, September 24. 2004

I solved the blog spam problem with the following trick: I simply added a [[CAPTCHA]] to the comment dialog. This was inspired by Kristian Koehntopp's Serendipity advocacy, and fortunately, there's a CAPTCHA system available for WordPress. You can find it here. It took some hacking to get it running, but now it works like a charm, and keeps comment spammers off my site.

Of course, the CAPTCHA system is not really one of the most advances ones (there could be definitely more distortions than just a fancy font and a low constrast between font and background), it is IMHO definitely enough to make it too difficult for spammers to break the CAPTCHA in order to post the spam. On the other side: probably the spammers would really break the CAPTCHA and thus solve an [[AI-complete]] problem? Then we would move on to the next, better CAPTCHA system, and probably the spammers would break it again, and so on, and the comment spammers would drive on AI research.

Posted by admin in Blogging at 22:59 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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Spambremse
Um den Spam in Artikel-Kommentaren klein zu halten, hat Garvin (einer der Entwickler dieser Blogsoftware) die ein oder andere Methode vorgestellt. Besonders gut gefallen hat mir die Idee, "Captchas" f?rtikel > 7 Tage zu verwenden.

Nachdem

#1 sententia fredericiana (Homepage) on 2004-09-25 12:05 (Reply)

blog spam (Update)
Suckers. More than 20 spam comments within a few hours. Using the antispam feature of wordpress - which requests for approval - didn't help. First of all I still get mails requesting for approval (you can turn off this feature but I don't want that)....

#2 mika's blog (Homepage) on 2004-09-24 23:43 (Reply)

So what do you think would be better for a font/background for the CHAPTCHA?

#3 Gudlyf (Homepage) on 2004-09-25 06:31 (Reply)

Well, I would like to see the background in different colors (different shades of gray ought to be enough) and the writing itself a bit more distorted, like the example [[CAPTCHA|on Wikipedia]].

#4 ak on 2004-09-25 10:43 (Reply)

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