Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff

CAPTCHA

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.

Comments

On March 28, 2007 5:56 PM, Sam Ruby said:

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

On March 28, 2007 5:59 PM, Gordon Weakliem said:

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.

On March 28, 2007 6:06 PM, Gernot Starke said:

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 :-)

On March 28, 2007 6:23 PM, Tom Wood said:

Seems to work just fine.

On March 28, 2007 6:41 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

Did you see a 4 digit code? Or a 6 digit code? It should be 4.

On March 28, 2007 6:44 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

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?

On March 28, 2007 8:27 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

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 …

On March 28, 2007 8:37 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

The security code should now be filled for you …

On March 28, 2007 8:44 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

If this comment appears, hiding of the code works.