If you haven’t already noticed, I’ve added some captcha’s to our comments to try to combat the spam we’ve been getting. I don’t particularly like captchas….I usually spend several minutes staring at them like a Rorschach Test but I think this will save time moving forward. Please let us know if they’re causing any problems beyond the severity of just being annoying.
I agree, captcha’s move work from the blog maintainer to the people commenting. They discourage conversation and are frustrating to people with disabilities.
I think it’s the wrong solution to solve an annoying problem. And the hardcore spammers are getting better at making it past captchas. I have seen much better success with a couple other simple tests that are far less annoying to actual humans.
A) refuse comments from clients who have javascript disabled (that cut 90+% of the spam on my blog)
B) do the simple human math question: in text “please type in the sum of four and five” and validate the response. Have a sufficiently large pool of template phrases and generate the numbers (and therefore the correct result) randomly. That cut another 90+% of the remaining spam to the point that I have about one spam comment a month that makes it past both tests…
Thanks for that, Chris. Now I feel like I’m being psychoanalyzed every time I solve a CAPTCHA. (Although it usually only takes a second for me.)
I hypothesize that a good homemade system could be quite effective. Off-the-shelf tech is very lucrative for spammers because breaking it means breaking a ton of blogs. If you happen to be the one guy who does something a certain way, you’re a much smaller target. I would still make sure it’s nontrivial and actually unique though.