No More Word Verification
I modified the word verification plugin that I installed yesterday so that only first time commenters are presented with the verification code. This is not as secure as having it appear every time but it should keep the bots at bay for now. The problem is once you implement a convenience for humans the bots get smarter and circumvent the requirement too. Hopefully, whatever bot has been spamming us won’t get updated for a while. Especially since it would have to get updated just for me and I’m not telling what I changed.
The scary part about this whole word verification thing is that I could write a program that can read the image. Blogger images with the twisted letters are harder but there are programs that can read those too. And since they’re a computer programs, they can quickly try again if they happen to get it wrong. I don’t know what the ultimate solution is but entering codes from graphic images isn’t it.
Please let me know if you have any problems with word verification. If, for some reason you can’t post, my e-mail address is to the right.
And, if you’re a spammer who happens to be reading this, go eat some poo.
Comments
Comment from Ed
Time September 29, 2005 at 6:47 am
It’s like trying to protect your car from being stolen. You can put all kind of alarms and immobiliser systems on it but professional thieves will always find away around them. It’s just a question of making it as hard for them as you possibly can.
If it comes to it there is nothing stopping a spamming human from filling in your comments.
But at least the number verification thing has stopped the bots on our site for the moment, and I’m more than happy with that.
By the way, I still had to fill in the number verification - not that I mind.
Comment from Midwestern City Boy
Time September 29, 2005 at 7:14 am
Renee: It’s not that hard when you consider all of the photo enhancement techniques available to us. Make it grayscale. Rotate, etc. And we have neural network technology and other techniques like handwriting recognition. Plus we know it has to be a letter and there aren’t that many of them. Add to that the fact that if you get it wrong, you can just try again and you don’t have to be too accurate. There are programs which can get or right almost al of the time the first try. But even if you only get it right 10% if the time, how long does it take to repost the spam ten more times if you’re a computer.
Ed: That’s a very appropriate analogy. So I guess the best thing to do is to make it hard enough for them that they go bug somebody else. You should not have needed to input the code. I’ve sent you an e-mail.
Comment from Wendy and Mark
Time October 1, 2005 at 12:40 am
We definitely sympathize with you. We finally had to turn comments off on our journal entries except for the most recent ones. I can’t believe that spammers even believe that people would click on their links from a spammed comment!
Love your weblog - maybe you’ll get a chance to check ours out sometime.
Comment from Midwestern City Boy
Time October 3, 2005 at 9:04 pm
Wendy and Mark: I just got done visiting your site. It was awesome. I hope you enjoyed ours too.
BTW: The people who write robots know no human is going to click on the spam link. They just do it to increase the number of links to their site so that they can get a higher page rank in Google. googlebot (Google’s indexing robot) isn’t smart enough to filter out spam when it crawls a site. You guys should probably consider word verification too. I’m pretty sure there is a mod for Greymatter. I’ve been 100% spam free since I implemented the feature.
Comment from Wendy and Mark
Time October 13, 2005 at 12:42 am
We’ll have to check into that. I spent the better part of 2 hours today finally purging the rest of the spam comments from our journal!
Oh yes, we loved your site. Lots of good reading and photos!
Comment from Midwestern City Boy
Time October 13, 2005 at 11:28 pm
Wendy and Mark: Thanks. Spammers can all eat poo so far as I am concerned. Why should anyone have to waste their time deleting e-mails that were unsolicited?
Comment from renee
Time September 28, 2005 at 10:55 pm
wow, you really know how to write programs to read squiggly letters? ok, now i’m impressed. that really doesn’t seem possible to me. as a designer i often need to find out the font that was used in various projects, so i go to whatthefont.com and obviously that site can read normal letters and even tell me what font it is. but i don’t know how you’d create a program to factor in the squiggling… that’s why i draw pretty pictures for a living i guess