Assassinating comment spam

After I logged in to discover 152 friendly (“Great site! Ci@lis!”) spam comments from Cialis and online poker sites, I had to move to a new solution for fighting comment spam. It seems the spammers circumvented my previous solution and implemented it into whatever scripts and tools they use to troll the vast blog geography. Luckily, due to the open source nature of Wordpress there were several available solutions for preventing automated comment spam through the use of ‘captcha‘ images. There was one Wordpress plugin, SecureImage, that stood out due to its simple drop-in functionality. You just throw the plugin into your Wordpress plugin directory and activate it. You must also have the ImageMagick module installed on your server, which is usually the case. If not, it’s an easy install. I had to make one change to the plugin script since it was not detecting the presence of ImageMagick’s convert utility. If you have the same problem, simply comment out the section where the script checks for the location of convert. To see the captcha script in action, try to leave a comment.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 9:21 am and is filed under Cool Tools, General, Software / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

MrCorey

Posted on June 4th

Never liked the captcha. I really don’t, now that Yahoo! uses it. I found that version 2 of Bad Behavior seems to work really well. Nothing to maintains and no false positives that I know of yet. You might wanna try it (and most templates can display its stats in the footer of the page.

case in point. I tried hard to get the first captcha to match, but I had to reload the page before trying again with a new image. My readers hated that. Its also discriminatory to blind readers. That’s why I gave it up. BTW this is try 2 for the second post…er try 3…er refresh and cross fingers (getting frustrating)