Odds & Ends Frank Ross on 18 Apr 2007 09:20 pm
Simple Math Versus Comment Spam
Simple Math wins! Well mostly. One of the things I love about the WordPress platform is the wide variety of freeware plug-ins you can use to solve various problems with your blog. There are lots of plug-ins for spam obviously.
I started out by using Akismet which does an awfully good job at identifying comment spam. However, it simply places comment spam in a queue and lately that queue was getting hundreds of humungous script-created spams per day. That meant I had to keep going in and cleaning out the queue - not a small task considering the page load time for those huge spams.
So I wanted something that would stop the scripts but I never liked the word verification masks that I see on some blogs. Some of them are so hard to read that I often need two or three attempts to get them right. And my eyesight is pretty good.
I tried WP-Gatekeeper, which is plug in that poses a simple question for commenters to answer. Very simple like ‘what color is an orange’? That proved to be buggy at least in this Wordpress blog, so I removed that.
So then I installed the “Did you pass math?” plug in, which presents very simple (yes I mean very simple) math questions for commenters to answer. Anyone over the age of 7 can answer them don’t worry - single digit addition only not advanced functions or calculus. Just something to make sure the commenters are really humans not scripts.
So if you see a little ‘3 plus 5′ question, just answer it and know that it really works well toward keeping the blog spam free.