Stopping Spam while remaining human friendly

[Barry O'Callaghan]

Spam is such a friggin pain. Shortly after I started my blog I added recaptcha to it. Captchas as a lot of you will know are obfusticated letters which a user has to figure out and type in order to post a comment, register, reveal your email address. Sometimes they can be tricky and have the potential to deter your users.

After initally thinking Captchas were the best thing sinced the sliced pan - I've come to the conclusion that for a small site they are a bad idea as you don't want to do anything to deter users or valuable contacts. So I've been looking for alternatives. I've come across some related ideas like Negative Captchas/ Honeypots.

Damien Katz: Negative CAPTCHA

Ned Batchelder: Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots

I'm a big fan of wordpress plugins if and when they are available to solve a problem as reinventing the wheel isn't my thing or forte(especially if it involves any coding ) but I haven't come across anything yet that quite fits the bill.

This one WordPress › WP-HoneyPot WordPress Plugins looked interesting but I don't think it's a honeypot in the way I was thinking. Especially when I looked at their home site and I noticed you had to use a captcha to register .

So just wondering what methods, if any, pal members are using to prevent spam and prventing your email address from being harvested without deterring your users?

[Strider1973]

To prevent my blog from being spammed, I use the WP plugin Akismet and I am happy with it.


Regarding my e-mail address, I published it in the "About" page in a fashin like

strider (at) poker (d0t) com

I am thinking about changing this to a contact form - it would reveal the user from typing in my e-mail address in his mail program. On the other hand, I would have to use a captcha funcionality, so I will not implement this as long as I get that few e-mails ;-)

[rbc]

Try WP-SpamFree. I have been using it for a long time and always catches the spam.