[thelist] CAPTCHA

Nan Harbison nan at nanharbison.com
Wed Jun 10 11:37:25 CDT 2009


The problem with comment moderation for the keeper of the site, is that you
might have hundreds of spam comments you have to wade through to find a
legitimate one! I worked on a site where I had to slog through about 600
posts for the company. It was not fun.
I started to use some phrases that were usually on spam that I didn't allow,
so if the form field contained these specific elements, they were ignored,
something like this:

	 $findspam1 = strpos($_POST['message'], "[");
	 $findspam2 = strpos($_POST['message'], "]");
	 $findspam3 = strpos($_POST['message'], "url");
	 $findspam4 = strpos($_POST['message'], "http://");
	 $findspam5 = strpos($_POST['message'], "link=");
	 if ($findspam1==false && $findspam2==false && $findspam3==false &&
$findspam4==false && $findspam5==false)
	 {
		then do whatever
	}

It eliminated virtually ALL spam.

Nan 

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of steven streight
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 11:17 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] CAPTCHA

I used to get spam storms quite often, and I recall hunting laboriously for
the posts that had spam on them. At first, on Blogger, they'd send me an
email for each comment, but not what post the comment had been attached to.

So, I started using a CAPTCHA in all my Blogger blogs, until a CEO who
quoted a post of mine, suggested that I "kill the CAPTCHA". 

As we all know, you often have to retype CAPTCHA characters, as many as 5
times in some cases I recall, until you get them right. Those letters or
numbers are all twisty curvey and very hard to read.

Instead of CAPTCHAs, he suggested I use Comment Moderation with Delayed
Posting. This enables me to delete any spam, but makes it easy for all legit
human posters to put comments on my blog.

So what if they have to wait up to 24 hours to see it?

The microwave mentality, "I want it now", is thwarted and taught patience,
eh?

Comment Moderation, where you get to approve and publish, or disapprove and
not publish, is the best route and has worked fine for me. 

Steven E. Streight
http://www.pluperfecter.blogspot.com


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