Sat 11 Dec 2004
I recently found a plugin for WordPress called AuthImage, which adds a simple image-based challenge response mechanism to the comment form. Users just have to type in a short, randomly generated string in order to process the comment. Not too much of a hassle.
(Thanks to Joe for putting me on to this tool at Alex Halvais' blog)
I've tried several different spam-killing mechanisms based on blacklists and stopwords and such, and none seems to work very well. This has absolutely ended my spam problem, at least for now. I highly recommend it.
One thing, though. The installation instructions are rather good, except they include one typo that'll break the whole thing. The instructions ask you to add a line of code to your wp-comments.php file that begins:
<img src="/wp-content/plugins…
But you've got to remove the extra slash at the beginning of the 'img src' statement. So it should begin:
<img src="wp-content/plugins…
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Wicked! Yet another reason to move to WordPress!!!
There is another small problem, which I need to take care of at some point. 1 and l ("one" and the letter "l") are sometimes confused by commenters. I keep meaning to go in and fix this (by eliminating numbers), but just haven't gotten around to it.
goddamn… Alex is right… this is the forth time I've entered this damn comment! Anyway, what I wanted to say was:
Maybe if the program used a serifed font, it would be easier to distinguish between letters like 1 and l and O and 0.
I modified it slightly just so that it doesn't use 1's anymore, but it still uses other digits. Hopefully that'll do it.
What would really be neat is if it would give the commenter a second chance to enter the code without dumping the comment.
Three rules for the spam game:
1) you can not win.
2) you can not draw.
3) you can not leave the play.
Greetings,
Antonio, from Malaga (Spain)