Comment spammers scum, WordPress and re-CAPTCHA

The spam comments on this site were progressively getting worse and worse. It’s a ridiculous situation since all comments are only show after approval so not a single one was ever being shown on the site. But it still takes time to monitor and becomes more annoying as time goes on. This morning I had already had 10 and so decided enough is enough.

I installed the very excellent re-CAPTCHA. This captcha software is a bit different for several reasons. Firstly it has a WordPress plugin which took 5s to install. Secondly it helps organisations digitise books, a very honourable motive. To install you just need to:

  1. Download the archive for the plugin at http://recaptcha.net/plugins/wordpress/
  2. Unzip the archive and copy the whole wp-recaptcha directory to your wp-content/plugins/ directory under WordPress.
  3. Register at http://recaptcha.net/ , and enter your site domain to recieve a public / private key.
  4. Enable re-CAPTCHA under the Plugins section of your WordPress admin and enter the two keys under the plugin configuration.
  5. Spend less time dealing with spam.

So how does re-CAPTCHA work then? Captchas rely on testing if you are human by quizzing you on something that should be easy for a human and relatively hard for a computer to solve. OCR, i.e. recognising the image of a word as text can be extremely hard for computers if the page is distorted, grainy or badly printed. So re-CAPTCHA asks you to OCR two words. Why two? Well one is already known since it has been confirmed by other users (how else would re-CAPTCHA know your answer was correct), the other is not known and so you are providing a useful service helping a document be recognised (and providing new captcha answers for other users). Simple but ingenius.

One response to “Comment spammers scum, WordPress and re-CAPTCHA”

  1. wicheda says:

    Testing the new captcha, even I have to enter it (configurable of course)!

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