LeeMobile

Simple Wordpress Spam Blocking

I’m not sure how many of you who read this are bloggers, but if you are then you’ll agree that spam is a huge problem. I absolutely hate how all my comment boxes have to be cleared out by me every so often.

No, I don’t want to learn about penis enlargement in my comment boxes!

I installed a spam blocking tool for this site that uses something called Captcha. Captcha is the technique of generating a random number of strings on an image, and skewing the image and asking the user to input what he sees. An example would be to ask you to input the following text from this image to verify that you’re not a spam bot:

The only problem with Captcha is that sometimes it’s really hard to read the words. What’s worse, is that spam bots are evolving to the point where they can now read some of the Captcha images generated, completely bypassing it altogether.

So the Captcha tool I installed earlier wasn’t effective at all… I still got spam.

Frustrated, it took me 3 seconds to realize I don’t any fancy Captcha tools and whatnot. All I need to do is to make sure whoever comments on my blog to input a string in which only a human being could do. So I plugged in some code into my comments section that asks for users to enter in LeeMobile. Spam bots can’t understand semantics… they can only do what’s programmed of them. So they can’t read the sentence to tell them to input “LeeMobile” to proceed.

Fancy schmancy spam blocking? Who needs it! For all you bloggers out there, give this one a try. Post a comment and checkout my simple homebrewed spam blocker in action.

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