Preventing Comment SPAM

February 9, 2006 · Posted in Mike's Blog 

I hate it when those spambots try to post their spam on my blog. I hate it so much that if I caught one of these spammers, I will definitely bash their heads against the wall. Ok, maybe not kill them but I will definitely make them suffer. Spam nowadays is like a plague, it’s everywhere. In emails, newsgroups, bulletin boards, wikis, and blog comments. So I tried to ask around for a solution to prevent spamming on my new and shiny blog. Again, Benj Arriola - came to the rescue. One of his blogs (yes Benj maintains more than one blog) pointed me to this blog which makes available a wordpress captcha plugin for download. I installed the plugin and came across another problem - my server’s PHP is not compiled with TTF rendering for GD which is required by the captcha plugin so I have to re-compile PHP to support it.

Compiling is almost done at this point and so by the time that you visit this site, you will be asked to enter a series of letters before you can actually make your post.

So, what’s this series of letters all about? Well, it’s based on the fact that spambots are just programs written by dedicated spammers. And since they are just programs, they can’t read. So the series of letters printed on a graphic will actually prevent these spambots from posting their ’spam comments’ here.

Goodbye spambots!



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Comments

2 Responses to “Preventing Comment SPAM”

  1. Benj Arriola on February 10th, 2006 6:57 am

    Welcome to Wordpress World! And your Captcha works great! Small request, maybe you can change my URL to the permalink I have for Captcha. :P So the stories are relevant to each other.

  2. Mike Lopez on February 10th, 2006 7:09 am

    Hi Benj, the link to your site has been updated to the actual page about Captcha.

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