I’ve recently seen a sharp increase in spam comments which are getting past the Akismet filter. I may need to take defensive action if it keeps up, such as moderating comments or using some kind of CAPTCHA. Please let me know if you have any suggestions. I don’t like anything that impedes the flow of legitimate comments, but I imagine that spam comments are just as annoying to you as they are to me.
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Under Attack by Spammers
The Noisy Channel 
5 replies on “Under Attack by Spammers”
I know some people consider my roman numeral CAPTCHA annoying, but writing a semi-elaborate, custom CAPTCHA is what kept the spam away.
I still get some, but it is manually entered and low volume.
Maybe we should start competing for fun and original CAPTCHAs. What about a CAPTCHA workshop?
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Well, the spam wave seems to have subsided for now, so I’ll hope it was just a freak occurrence. The roman numeral CAPTCHA is mildly annoying (I tend to cut and paste into a Google search to use their calculator), but obviously preferable to drowning in spam. I’ll take it one day at a time.
As for fun and original CAPTCHAs, this sounds like something Luis Von Ahn or his students might/should be working on. Not that more of us can’t play too.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/
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You should know that there have been a couple of workshops on this topic. See http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/prr/HIP05/ for one organized by my colleagues.
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Brian, thanks for the link! Of course, my more immediate mundane concern is how much that work has translated into easily installed WordPress plug-ins. But I’m intrigued by the research and will check it out.
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[…] loves company, so I’m reassured to know that I’m not the only recent victim of the uptake in spam. Matt Hurst reports that Political Streams has recently been hit with a lot of LiveJournal spam. […]
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