Blog Spam
Having had serious spam when using MoveableType and after transferring to Wordpress I decided I needed to take drastic action.
I was on the uni server when I used MT, but it didn’t have the PHP graphics module so the Captcha didn’t work. I left that blog, there were so many spam comments and trackbacks.
I have nothing against MT just that Wordpress has been a lot faster and easier to work with. But anyway back to the spam. I was getting a lot of spam on the new server where I set up Wordpress. I didn’t bother doing anything just placing all comments and trackbacks in moderation.
Now I want to do things right. So I have installed WP-Gatekeeper. It’s simple in its aims and is a little better than a captcha. I was going to use the captcha method but that has accessibility issues.
There are now ways to beat simple captchas by using character recognition and AI. That guy didn’t even try too hard so you can imagine what a whole crew of spammers might do. Though Pure Mango shows how to break the image method without using OCR software. This just goes to show we always need to be one step ahead but not make it too hard for the end user.
For a funny take on spam, Spamusement is an original online comic.