Captcha-ing the Spammers
I get a fair amount of spam on this site; less than most, but significant enough to be a problem. Most of it is trackback spam which, by design, isn't an easy thing to combat, but Drupal does a decent job of things.
Comment spam, on the other hand, has been giving me a headache or two, and not in the way that you think. You see, Drupal does catch most if not all of it, but it also overzealously picks up real people's comments (and as you can no doubt see, I have far too few of those as it is!), just like my last CMS, Pivot.
Like in Pivot, I've decided to implement Captchas, which basically means that you'll have to answer a silly question at the end of the page before submitting your comment, in order to prove that you're a human (and then hopefully the spam filter won't eat up your message until I find it in the approval queue a day later).
Thanks to the Captcha Pack module these questions are quite varied. I haven't used the most common image captchas (like you'd find on a blogspot page, for instance) because I don't particularly care for them, and prefer the text questions instead.
I sometimes worry that some of the math questions might be a little too much for some people... But, then I ask myself, "Do I want those kinds of people commenting anyway?"









Vishal K Bharadwaj is a generalist; a writer, graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and all-round crazy person.
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I just got a question asking me to do math!
AND I GOT IT WRONG!
WHY ARE YOU SO CRUEL!? WHY MUST YOU POINT OUT MY MATH INADEQUACIES?!
*counts fingers again*
Why am I so cruel?
Because Math BDSM is the bestest kind.
Mmmm, MathBDSM....
PS Your comment was eaten up by spambot. I have retrieved it from its cialis and viagra infested bowels. Huzzah!
Aw... and now its telling me Im potential Spam. I don't even eat meat, Im made of vegetable proteins (no wonder I can't do math).
My self esteem is crushed.
Maybe it knows I'm Indian and it's giving all you backwards Imperial Measurements folks Metric puzzles, thereby confoozling you.
Hehehe stupid Imperialists. I thow my A4 sheets at you!*
*(Also, penises are bigger when measured in millimetres. Just saying...)
Hm. I do not measure my penis very often. It gets embarassed.
But I wonder how boobs measure up. Does anyone know the metric equivalent to bra size?
I stop counting past one handful.
I DONT WANT TO BE SPAM!
Why?! Why does the bot hate me so?
I hate potted meat.
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