21 Nivôse CCXIII (January 10, 2005)
Well, There's Spam, Egg, Sausage, And Spam. That's Not Got Much Spam In It.
This following link is for those who don't regularly check Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: If you're getting comment spam, the fastest way to get more comment spam is to fail to remove it.
In other words, what I'm trying to say is: clean up your damn comments! (If you don't already do so.)
Also: apologies on the triple-post the other day. The one at 18:00 was a test of MT3's scheduled posting feature that I had set the week before and completely forgotten about. (Suffice to say, it was a success.)
Wordpress has a lot of spam to. You don't free yourself from spam by jumping to the other side of the pond.
I noticed that the amount of WP spam seems to be increasing. I'm guessing that spammers are starting to spam it as more and more people switch.
There're probably a few solutions out there for it, but I've never really looked into it.
Posted by ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://leftblank.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Yeah. I figure the only way to avoid spam for sure is to write your own, or require a non random click or something like that.
Yeah, non-random click might do it. There are, of course, downsides to that as well. (The one that immediately leaps to mind is that it would be difficult for anyone using a text-only browser, but I doubt that anyone who reads your site is using Lynx. Except for, occassionally, me.)
So long as you don't implement captchas, then I won't bitch about it too much.
Suppose someone reading this didn't know what a captchas was. What would you tell them?
Hypothetically.
t;completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"
They can be many things, but the one that's most common involves taking an image-representation of some text, and distorting it so that text-recognisers can't tell what the text is. The user is then asked to enter the text in a field. If the text is entered correctly, then it's assumed that the user is actually a human.
ie: 
There are obvious issues with them, the main one being that they completely destroy the ability of any user who uses a non-image based browser (ie: the text-to-speech browsers that are commonly used for people with sight impairments) to use the site in question.
Discounting that, there are two other main problems with them: the first is that some of the commonly used ones can actually be decoded by OCR algorithms (or, if you increase the difficulty, they become so difficult that even people have trouble decoding them). The second problem is that their are ways around them if you really want to: it's been known for people to display an image from one site on another, and get users to unwittingly decode the captcha for them.
(For the record: I find that dsbl plugin that I mentioned on your site works quite well at stopping spam. The MT version has stopped quite a few comments from even making it to the blacklist on my site. The only downside is that users who use open proxies can no longer comment.)
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