Captcha is a nice anti-spam technique for websites. By forcing a user to enter a word that is a bit scrambled on the screen you can eliminate a large amount of spam that you would otherwise have to manually fix. reCaptcha is a free service that provides captcha functionality through an API. That’s what I’m using on this site and to be honest what I’m growing quite fond of. At this point I’ve leveraged it for about 5 sites in the past month and all have seen a dramatic drop in spam over previous techniques I’ve tried. This has been across Joomla!, WordPress and the latest: MediaWiki. The ConfirmEdit Extension…
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reCaptcha and Comments
After talking with the folks at Xsanity I have decided to try and open up comments to the site. You can still auth and post comments if you have an OpenID account, but you can now do so through the standard WordPress method provided you fill in the Captcha info. We’ll see how this works. Last time I tried comments there was simply too much spam. I’m willing to give it a second shot though, especially with the fancy-schmancy OCR whatnot enabled… To get Captcha to work I used the WP-reCAPTCHA plug-in available here. In order to activate it you need an API key from recaptcha but once you paste…