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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.
Akismet works like a charm for me.

The ones I like the best are the ones that show you a coloured box and ask you to describe what colour it is
4+7 is 11 right?!

I’m also very happy with Askimet, though it does let the random spam comment through once in a while. As far as impenetrable captchas go, however, http://www.hotcaptcha.com/ is pretty hacker safe

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?

Good thing you’re letting readers know about this - I’ve never seen the math validator so I’d be wondering what it was otherwise…

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.

Well, I use this one as well, and ever since I implemented it I have not seen any spam. I guess it is true that any computer can get a + b and add the numbers with complete accuracy, but it would have to be intelligent and ALL websites would have to have “Sum of a + b ?” so that they can scan that. I could just change to Addition and take away the question mark. Make it to where they still have to guess. But great point on that. I had not considered that, and I am a programmer.

I use a combination of things, but the biggest spam protection I use is the worst offendors extension to Akismet from http://boakes.org/ that will give you a list of frequent spammers.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 have seen people like Matt Cutts using the maths plug-in for quite some time, so I guess it should be effective. In Wordpress options (discussion) you can prevent others from pingbacks and trackbacks - so there is no really need of any plugin to do that.

It’s all good now. Just go and cry yourself to sleep, and come back tomorrow strong

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

I use the default plugin akismet that comes with wordpress. It is good enough for me as of now as I don’t receive so much spam. But sometimes it flags my own comments as spam

I think the Image verification is the best option as Jamsi suggested. This one also may work, but it can be passed by spammer.

Wow i get the easy math questions (3 + 4)
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

[…] Well it didn’t last long. You may remember at the end of October I switched to the math comment spam protection system. Unfortunately for the last two weeks I have been waking up to about 100 spam comments which must be smart enough to do basic math. […]

It’s a great method of protection, i’ve seen it before but now i know where i can get it.. thanks alot

poor idea for people who suck at math j/k but it’s a great plugin i know and talked to some people who use it aswel and they’r very happy about it

For the moment it might work, but it by far more easier to crack then any captcha image.

I tried to make a comment on a site because which wanted me to find the sum of the root number etc. I could not figure it out an it was a genuine comment I wrote out and had questions and everything. Can the Spam filters figure this one out or is it manual spam that you were getting?

i’m using akismet …
but i still get more than 50 spam comments lik everyday …
damn them spammers …

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 hope we don’t start seeing more and more sites with 2 different captcha / questions. I remember seeing at least one like that. I think that would be the simplest and most effective, but terribly annoying.

I have found the math captcha is more thourough than some of the others I have tried for forms in both Joomla, and WordPress. Less slip through, but also less submissions. I too hope we don’t start seeing 2 verify items per page, PITA.