Captcha Comments Replace Spam Filter

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 12 Jul 2006 16:00:42 GMT  <== Webmaster stuff ==> 

I've installed Drupal's Captcha module (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). This forces you to transcribe some random text, designed to be hard for computer programs to grok, to post an anonymous comment or to register. If you register, you will be able to post comments without the Captcha nonsense.

This should stop automated comment spam. It won't, however, stop rooms full of low-paid workers posting spam. We'll discover soon which is my problem.

I hate Captcha strings, since I often have a hard time decoding them. These don't appear to be too bad. Please let me know how they work for you, either by comments to this post, or via email to bill@billstclair.com (or to billstclair@gmail.com if my web hosting mail forwarder doesn't like your email server).

The captcha module is at http://drupal.org/project/captcha

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Comments (7):

Testing

Submitted by Justin Buist on Thu, 13 Jul 2006 03:40:15 GMT

I struggle with the Blogger version of captcha but this one is quite easy for my to figure out.

Not a bad idea. I've noticed that even my pithy little blog gets a bunch of SPAM comments when I moved to a WordPress blog. It seems to be catching about 75% of them automatically.

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It appears to be working.

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 13 Jul 2006 11:10:48 GMT

It appears to be working. Not a single spam comment overnight.

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looks good to me!

Submitted by MRJarrell on Thu, 13 Jul 2006 13:14:51 GMT

Having become used tto the blogger version this is like cake. I sometimes have issue with their version, too. In the end, tho it's worth it to avoid the spambots. I have noticed a new trend, tho, flaming spammers who insert their buzz marketing via a flame. Interesting, but annoying.

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very good, and text is

Submitted by assicurazioni on Thu, 03 Aug 2006 20:27:55 GMT

very good, and text is really clear, I have when I've to type images multiple times

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There appear to be a few

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 03 Aug 2006 20:51:12 GMT

There appear to be a few spammers who type the spam themselves. The comment I'm responding to here, for example. But I've only seen three of those (this one included) since I put in the captcha, so it's been much easier to deal with than separating the real comments from the auto-generated spam.

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Sorry, but it was not my

Submitted by assicurazioni on Fri, 04 Aug 2006 07:47:18 GMT

Sorry, but it was not my intention to spam your site, I searched on google about captcha solution for drupal,your blog come up and I commented the post..just that.

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It was the link in your

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:16:35 GMT

It was the link in your comment, to a commercial advertisement site, that made me think it was spam.

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