I decided to disable the CAPTCHA in the comments section – at least for a few days. I haven’t seen much spam here lately, and I feel that Akismet and Bad Behavior have been doing an excellent job scooping up all the unwanted crap so far so I decided to do a little experiment. I will keep the CAPTCHA off for few days and see if the level of spam changes.
If I get hammered with spam, I will simply re-enable it. If I don’t, I might just keep it off for good.
Also, if ever got weird error messages when posting here, I apologize. I think these errors might have been triggered by the code in the CAPTCHA/comment preview plugin. Or not. This might help me track down the source of these issues.
What do you think? Is this a good idea, or am I in for a world of pain?
Well, the proof will be in the pudding. It took both Bad Behavior and Captcha to eliminate spam on my blog, without Akismet.
*knocks on wood*
This has done the trick for me.
I use SpamKarma, but Akismet is supposed to be good too. I’ve been getting a lot of spam attempts lately, but it’s all being blocked nicely.
Well, I got 3 spams that got caught by akismet so far. Let’s see if I get much more. I just don’t want to sift through pages of blocked spam each day. :P
Akismet caught about 20 posts so far. I’m gonna plug the CAPTCHA back in and see if it drops again.
Does Akismet hold for your review? I’ve never used that one before. Spam Karma asks me to moderate a couple of comments a month, but otherwise it just lets me know every couple of days how many it’s caught. I do review occasionally for false positives, but they’re rare.
Yup, it holds them for review. I usually don’t see them unless I specifically go to Manage tab and go to the Akismet section. From there I can de-spam or delete them.
I know that buddy of mine gets snagged by Akismet every single time he posts here and I have no clue why. Other than him though, false positives are indeed rare. I’m wondering if Spam Karma and Akismet would work well togethern :P
When I had the CAPTHA on most of the stuff that would end up in Akismet would be false-positives. Now the usual garbage is showing up there.
Let’s see if I get blocked again. :-)
Hey! It worked! :-) So the root cause for whatever reason was CAPTCHA. Hmmm, very interesting…CAPTCHA caused Akismet to block me…weird.
Wow! Look at that! Weird.
I don’t think the two plugins were interacting in any way. But who knows. Very odd.
Hey, maybe Akismet finally learned to accept you. :P
I view any software that learns to accept me as inherently flawed.
LOL
test
I installed a brand new CAPTCHA box. This one is different from the previous one so hopefully there will be no more weird errors when posting comments. It also seems more readable.
Let me know if you absolutely hate it.
Oh, and Miloš – if Akismet starts flagging you as a spammer again this will officially be the weirdest shit I’ve seen cause both plugins are completely different and unrelated.
Here I go again…let’s see if this works
it worked…I feel liberated! :-)
LOL! Awesome.
You got the same captcha box as DMotR?
Or does it just look similar…
I miss the preview button :( that let me put in slightly.. experimental html stuff (or smileys) that I wasn’t sure of the correctness of, then see if it worked
5 seconds later I notice the little thing above the box that tells you what XHTML tags you can use..
[quote comment=”4900″]You got the same captcha box as DMotR?[/quote]
Same plugin – yes. :)
I might enable the preview again. When I upgraded that pugin, the buttons got all funky and out of alignment, so I disabled it till I sort it out.
Honestly though may i make a suggestion, currently I am working on a fun little wp plugin that is doing basically what this plugin is doing but simpler… but click here to download a really nice system untill I am finnished then maybe use mine.
Hmm… Hashcash is nice, but I don’t like the reliance on javascript to post comments. It doesn’t seem like that thing degrades gracefully.