re-CAPTCHA: Spam fighter

Posted by scoop on February 28th, 2010 in Splogs, Tips |

Spam – the bane of bloggers’ existence. No matter how much one may wish spam away there’s no thing to be done but face and fight it.

One of the things that some bloggers do to fight spam is simply turn of their comments section. Now, I don’t know about you, but turning off the comment section is just not an option I will ever consider, after all how will (real) readers be able to provide their (sometimes) valuable feedback easily (no one really likes to email and anyway posting your email can lead to spam in your email!).

Another thing that bloggers do is to moderate their comments. Now this is what we do here but this is not a good option for everyone, especially those who do not the time to browse through comments, which of course contains spam that Akismet failed to catch, and approve or disapprove them.

So what this leaves us with is re-CAPTCHA. re-CAPTCHA is a an anti-spam technology that requires people to type in the letters/words/numbers they see on the screen before the comment can be posted. This ensures that the comment isn’t automated and the the commenter is a real live person. It may be seen by some as cumbersome but it really is a good compromise between having to wait for comment approval and no sort of moderation at all. The only catch though is that people who link drop and provide no real valuable comments can not be filtered through re-CAPTCHA. However, at least that leaves you with a lot less spam to deal with.