Josh's Weblog

I hate that. I want to get on one of those blog sites that has the little visual checker thing where you have to type in a bunch of random letters that are hard to read. I need to become a lawyer so I can start hunting these freaks down and suing them out of a job.

Me

Kelly writes:

I want to get on one of those blog sites that has the little visual checker thing where you have to type in a bunch of random letters that are hard to read.

Those are called CAPTCHAs, short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” They are a bad idea if your web site in intended for use by handicapped people. In general it's a good idea to use a CAPTCHA when you set up a permanent account with a password, like Typekey. If people have to use them every time they want to post a comment, they will just pass.

Also, the spammers have figured out how to beat CAPTCHAs by putting them in front of porn sites and letting other humans do the work for them. A blog is a pretty minor target for such activity, but spammers have ways of automating almost anything.

After all, why bother with referrer spam? Only one or two people read the logs from web servers anyway, right?

I've got two blogs that I use Captcha on but since I upgraded to MT 3.16 its broken. Back to Blacklist for me till they get a fix for it. The thing is with Captcha I've had Zero spam. With Blacklist it only helps so much.

What really worked was forcing Previews on this first comment page. Then I also changed the names for the comment.cgi and the tb.cgi . That really freaked out the spam bots.

Later

SpamLookup is the plugin I recommend now. It's great. I don't use MT-Blacklist anymore, although MT-Moderate is still needed to moderate trackbacks.