CAPTCHA
March 28, 2007
I’ve grown tired of the problems with junk comments, false positives, and all the hassle involved in with handling this. My apologies if any of your comments failed to show up — MT reports they’ve been held for approval even if they have been identified as junk.
Essentially, I believe there are only two options that actually work: disable comments altogether, or use some CAPTCHA™ method. I’ve decided to do the latter, so comments now require a preview first, and then a 4-digit code. I’ve used the SCode plugin for Movable Type — all of the other Spam protection mechanisms built into MT never worked out for me (which makes me wonder why I don’t do what all the cool kids do and write my own blog software).
If you want to do me a favor, leave a comment and let me know if you run into any problems — via email if necessary.
About
This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on March 28, 2007 5:04 PM. The previous post in this blog was Higher Order Messaging in Ruby. The next post in this blog is RESTful Rails Drops Semicolons. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
Comments
A test
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at March 28, 2007 5:53 PM | link
Question 1: why must humans see the captcha?
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2006/05/30/Captcha-this
Question 2: why must humans do a preview?
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/03/19/Automatic-Preview
Posted by: Sam Ruby at March 28, 2007 5:56 PM | link
You’re kidding, CAPTCHA is a trademark?
I have to say that I’m very anti-CAPTCHA. It seems to mainly deter everyone but spammers from commenting; I still get occasional blasts of a dozen or so spam comments. I’m curious to see what your experience is like.
Posted by: Gordon Weakliem at March 28, 2007 5:59 PM | link
freedom comes at a cost: If people abuse their freedom to leave comments, others have to pay the price in form of hieroglyph-decipering, aka captcha. Makes me keep of commenting on many blogs, though… (but, naturally, not with Stefan :-)
Posted by: Gernot Starke at March 28, 2007 6:06 PM | link
Seems to work just fine.
Posted by: Tom Wood at March 28, 2007 6:23 PM | link
Did you see a 4 digit code? Or a 6 digit code? It should be 4.
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at March 28, 2007 6:41 PM | link
Gordon: I agree, and I don’t like CAPTCHAs. (It’s trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University, BTW). But I received way too many spams comments - sometimes about 200 a day. Absolutely intolerable. Maybe it’s because we’re using MovableType and this is a primary target?
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at March 28, 2007 6:44 PM | link
Sam, I think I found the problem why you couldn’t post - there were some leftover 6-digit codes lying around in the file system. Things should work now.
Working on your other suggestions now …
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at March 28, 2007 8:27 PM | link
The security code should now be filled for you …
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at March 28, 2007 8:37 PM | link
If this comment appears, hiding of the code works.
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at March 28, 2007 8:44 PM | link