Comments on: Captcha support added for commenting https:/2011/02/captcha-support-added-for-commenting/ Developer resources for the X-Plane flight simulator Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:08:50 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 By: Jonathan https:/2011/02/captcha-support-added-for-commenting/#comment-1641 Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:08:50 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/blog/?p=3163#comment-1641 Thanks for that, Chris. Now I feel like I’m being psychoanalyzed every time I solve a CAPTCHA. (Although it usually only takes a second for me.)

I hypothesize that a good homemade system could be quite effective. Off-the-shelf tech is very lucrative for spammers because breaking it means breaking a ton of blogs. If you happen to be the one guy who does something a certain way, you’re a much smaller target. I would still make sure it’s nontrivial and actually unique though.

]]> By: Dirk https:/2011/02/captcha-support-added-for-commenting/#comment-1640 Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:48:54 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/blog/?p=3163#comment-1640 I agree, captcha’s move work from the blog maintainer to the people commenting. They discourage conversation and are frustrating to people with disabilities.

I think it’s the wrong solution to solve an annoying problem. And the hardcore spammers are getting better at making it past captchas. I have seen much better success with a couple other simple tests that are far less annoying to actual humans.
A) refuse comments from clients who have javascript disabled (that cut 90+% of the spam on my blog)
B) do the simple human math question: in text “please type in the sum of four and five” and validate the response. Have a sufficiently large pool of template phrases and generate the numbers (and therefore the correct result) randomly. That cut another 90+% of the remaining spam to the point that I have about one spam comment a month that makes it past both tests…

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