check out – http://www.thepcspy.com/contact ; -)))

I’ve seen a nice one some time ago which presented two random pictures from flickr (of course someone had to pick and sort thousands of them) and asked questions like – which one is older? or which one is faster? or which one is more expensive? – this one is a bit hard to be beaten by a quickly prepared bot and easy to use by the user.

Someone said a nice thing a few comments above – when it gets profitable to create a bot to defeat a certain system it will certainly be done – just matter of time – i’ll add that the best solution is to switch to a different system when the old one stops working – we have to be active to fight spammers

I’ve actually installed this to my site. I didn’t have any spam protection before but now i am testing this to see how well it works. I had like 62 pieces of spam in the last 24 hours so i hope this clears up my problem. Cheers Yaro and thanks for the link/plugin!

Lucas

I am now convinced that I’m probably missing hundreds, if not thousands of LEGITIMATE comments from the past 6 months or so I have been using Spam Karma.

Bad karma for Spam Karma

Besides that – all good!

However, one MAJOR difference – I woke up to 24 comments that required approval, 15 of which were legitimate comments. I have not had that many over night in a long time and I’m beginning to think that Spam Karma may have deleted A LOT of my legitimate comments in the past.

I am now convinced that I’m probably missing hundreds, if not thousands of LEGITIMATE comments from the past 6 months or so I have been using Spam Karma. That makes me sad

Since the math is in html and not an image it would be easy to create an application to do the math as it autosubmits the spam.

You would not believe how easy it is to fool captcha’s. There are at least 5 scripts on my HDD that can identify any Vbulletin/Wordpress/Phpbb etc type of captcha’s.

Until spammers find a way to make that math parsing and calculation script, I am having 0 spam comments in my blog.

I have about 50.000 comments caught by Akismet in 8 months. My friend Lorien at Search Engine Journal has about 890.000. After the mat comment , there are .. like .. 0

I don’t usually recommend things that don’t work.

Yanis, did you receive any (and I mean ANY) spam comment since you installed this plugin here or at Small Business Branding ?

I see it as a temporary ploy until enough people are using it so that it becomes “profitable” to add it to the spam submission applications.

That’s its downfall. It’s an arms race.

Brilliant, where do I get it?

Unfortunately, it’s a hybrid of a Movable Type plugin available at MT Keystrokes but in principle it’s easy to port if you know your PHP and JavaScript.

What it then means is that the spam harvester can only attack the comments form with a direct scrape of the form every time

Or, once the plugin is better known, submit each comment 20 times with mcspvalue=1, 2, 3 etc. No scrape required.
I see it as a temporary ploy until enough people are using it so that it becomes “profitable” to add it to the spam submission applications.

I use a JavaScript system which looks for keystrokes before posting

Brilliant, where do I get it?

What variability? Every computer on earth can solve a simple addition question…it doesn’t matter that the numbers change, it is still a + b = c and this puzzle can be solved by a computer with 100% accuracy. That’s why they went to the image type human verification systems.

Obviously, but that’s not the point. Most common blogging systems have a script that captures free form text in a fairly predictable format. Adding a non-free form text requirement to a commenting system with a unique form name makes it a more difficult process. What it then means is that the spam harvester can only attack the comments form with a direct scrape of the form every time. This isn’t productive from a spamming point of view so harvesters tend to deal with default installations of the usual suspects such as MT, WP, TP etc because they know the fields in advance.

Read the requirements for a good CAPTCHA, this system does not meet them.

Whichever way you slice it, image based captcha isn’t accessible. Screen selectable/readable text is.

I use a JavaScript system which looks for keystrokes before posting. It also has a noscript fallback to email comments to me. I have successfully eliminated spam 100%. It’s also degradable, functional and should be accessible.

If I see the same IP address more than once in my frequent spammers list, then I add that IP address to deny access to my website. It’s cut my spam attempts on my site to about 5% of what they were before I started doing that.

But due to the variability of the answer it makes it a programmatically difficult thing to do so is in fact quite a good filter.

What variability? Every computer on earth can solve a simple addition question…it doesn’t matter that the numbers change, it is still a + b = c and this puzzle can be solved by a computer with 100% accuracy. That’s why they went to the image type human verification systems.

Read the requirements for a good CAPTCHA, this system does not meet them.

I don’t see this as being very effective. Since the math is in html and not an image it would be easy to create an application to do the math as it autosubmits the spam.

But due to the variability of the answer it makes it a programmatically difficult thing to do so is in fact quite a good filter.

The ones I like the best are the ones that show you a coloured box and ask you to describe what colour it is

And what if you’re colour blind or can’t see?

4+7 is 11 right?!