Wordpress, Spam and reCaptcha
After having comments set to “always moderate” for a while, I’ve gotten tired of deleting the spam comments bots dump on my blog so I turned on Askimet once I realized it wasn’t on and installed the reCaptcha plugin for Wordpress.
On every other site, captchas are a pain for me. I usually type the image letters in a few times since it usually tells me I’m wrong even though it looks right to me. Most of the time I push through just to post that comment. Sometimes I just leave the site in frustration.
ReCaptcha seems to be a little nicer to use. It’s based on words (or parts of words) scanned out of books and visually altered a bit to defeat spam bots while maintaining readability for us lowly humans. The letters or words you type in are used to digitize public domain books so your typing isn’t done in vain. Also available is an audio clip you can play that speaks some numbers aloud instead of typing the letters. It can be refreshed without having to reload the entire page, which is nice if you’ve written a long or link-heavy post and don’t want it to get lost.
I may try a couple other plugins if the spam comments don’t slow down. What’s working on your site and how difficult is your method to implement?
[update] I am still getting spam comments and didn’t understand why, so I wrote a gibberish comment and tried submitting it without typing in the captcha. It was accepted and I was confused. I went to the reCaptcha site to find out why and it seems the plugin works by marking a comment as spam when the captcha isn’t correctly typed in. So the comment is still accepted but when it’s marked as spam, Askimet immediately dumps it into the Spam Comments box and neither you nor your reader ever sees the spam. Pretty slick! I’d say reCaptcha is a good alternative for those looking at anti-spam solutions who dislike the “normal” captcha software.