Since I started this blog, somehow my popularity with spammers has increased dramatically.  It’s probably to do with the “babe and bikini” related posts which I imagine would top the list of attractive spammer keywords.  At any rate, this has resulted in a lot of comments to the site being nothing but spam.  Because of this I was forced to use a moderation process to block the spam before it reached the viewers.  I hate doing this because I would rather that people were just able to comment and then go about their business without me having to “approve” what they’ve said.

I started looking around for other solutions.  The most obvious solution that came to mind was that of a “CAPTCHA” image, a rather clumsy, contrived acronym standing for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.  The most popular implementation seems to be reCAPTCHA which (for reasons way too technical to bother describing here) is incredibly secure and accessible even to the blind.

Now you’ll notice whenever you are submitting a comment you are asked to respond to a CAPTCHA image, which is unfortunate, but common enough that I think people are used to it.  I believe this is probably the best solution but if anyone has any other ideas, let me know.  I also had to fiddle around with the plugin to get it to display just right so if anyone reads this and needs help getting things just right, let me know – I may be able to help.