Reducing Wordpress Comment Spam
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a slow but steady increase in comment spam on my blog which although being caught by Spam Karma, is still annoying, taking up my time and I’m aware that Spam Karma is no longer being developed, maintained or supported.
I’ve had challenge and response in place for well over a year, but it was a pretty basic one such as “What colour is the sea? RED/BLUE?” but have decided that it was time to see what else was available and happened to stumble across reCaptcha.
I’ve seen reCaptcha on a number of websites, but was unaware of it being available to Wordpress users. The reCaptcha system uses successful decodings to helps digitise books for online use at the same time as protecting blogs from spammers. If the human can’t read what is shown, they can request a new set of words or can request they are played out loud.
If you mix the reCaptcha system with the Michael Toppa’s Deko Boko plugin, you can incorporate the reCaptcha process not only in your comments section, but your contact forms too.
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Thank you, I was just looking for the same thing. I’ll certainly try it, because I have to open comments to the public, but spam is a killer.
Hey, one thing you may want to know. Microsoft Research tested captcha recognition and found that it confuses humans MORE than computers. That was a jar-dropping news for me, which made me stay away from it for too long. But I guess, well… that’s still the best thing available…
True! I know a few times I’ve looked at the characters and wondered what they were.
I know Microsoft Research Asirra which is a visual Captcha system. After a bit of digging around it looks like they’ve made it publicly available, and there also appears to be a Wordpress plugin which could also be worth trying out.
Asirra kind of fun, but I am not sure how good idea is that. People are accustomed to captcha, so at least that’s an expected annoyance…
Turns out that this didn’t catch any more than any other system which is very disappointing
I’m now giving another plugin a try, asking users to do a calulation prior to submitting any comments.