As some might have noticed, this blog was down for several hours/days in the last few weeks.
The reason for this was COMMENT SPAM.
In the beginning (around 6 months ago) I thought on getting along with it without countermeasure. But spam rose to a climax of about 30 per day. I’ve received somewhat 1000 unsolicited comments, only two of them were published – by accident. This is due to the very well-done comment-handling tools in WordPress. But I like to know what people are writing on my site, so I am getting an e-mail whenever a comment needs approvement. So it got an unbearable situation.
Solutions: Turing-Test, collaborative fight?!
- The first solution, that came into my mind was CAPTCHA. I don’t wan’t to explain the whole story of Captchas, as there’s for example a comprehensive article on Captchas in Wikipedia.
In short it’s a Turing-Test. There are disadvantages:- Rather complicated to implement.
- Many captcha implementations are inefficient and do not protect against programs, as Sam Hocevar explains on his website.
- Many are inaccessible or even more complicated to implement
- There are even other ways to go around captchas, as marvellous Cory Doctorow already has posted in his blog entry “Solving and creating captchas with free porn” in 2004
I haven’t tried a captcha.
to be continued…