Browse: Home / / Yay Akismet

Yay Akismet

By barneyb on January 22, 2009

Just looked at my stats and Akismet has killed off almost 200,000 spam comments for me. Not sure when I switched to WordPress, but in any case, that's a lot of spam I've been blissfully unaware of, and no CAPTCHA required. And for those of you who aren't regular readers, my opinion of CAPTCHA is somewhere just below serial child molesters.

Posted in

7 responses to “Yay Akismet”

  1. Jules Gravinese
    Jules Gravinese
    January 22, 2009 at 10:45 pm |

    So.. tell us how you really feel :) haha

    Have you looked at reCaptcha? It's the same verification idea but it uses actual words (2 of them). So even if they are mangled it's still really easy for the human brain to figure it out.

    "reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. [...] reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA."
    http://recaptcha.net/

  2. rob
    rob
    January 23, 2009 at 12:49 am |

    I don't know what you're talking about mate, captchas are awesome and so user friendly.

    Before you can comment please type the following:
    ⠻┠Sɫʃيځשםא⌘⎋ZZ78⎃⑆⑇⏅⍲⎈

    Punish the visitor, they like it.

  3. bill
    bill
    January 23, 2009 at 1:55 am |

    I'm with @rob. I like CAPTCHA. I think it ranks right up there with programming in Unlambda and repeatedly trying to kick myself in the nuts, at the same time.

  4. David
    David
    January 23, 2009 at 7:10 am |

    @Rob,

    That's a real easy one: ⠻┠Sɫʃيځשםא⌘⎋ZZ78⎃⑆⑇⏅⍲⎈

  5. barneyb
    barneyb
    January 23, 2009 at 9:36 am |

    @Jules

    reCAPTCHA doesn't bother me as much when I run into it on the web, since I know it's actually useful for something, and I rarely am unable to answer correctly. But still something I'd never put on anything I'm in control of. There are just too many other alternatives that don't punish the users of the site.

  6. Jules Gravinese
    Jules Gravinese
    January 23, 2009 at 1:24 pm |

    Personally, I put in a css-hidden field. Bots fill out all fields (even display:none), humans do not. It's a VERY simple test. Zero user interaction, 99% efficiency.

  7. Sebastiaan
    Sebastiaan
    January 26, 2009 at 2:49 am |

    @Jules:
    That's one of the beauties of CFFormProtect (http://cfformprotect.riaforge.org/index.cfm) – no Captcha, Akismet enabled, fully configurable and now a part of BlogCFC ;-)