In recent months, the blog comment spam problem has gotten progressively worse, as more and more parasitic scumbags take to hijacking any sort of comment system to drive up their search engine rankings and/or drive gullible people to malware-installing websites. In the light of this, The Null Device has now installed a CAPTCHA-like system for preventing comment spam on its comment pages.

From now on, whenever you enter a comment, you will need to type several letters, as seen on a graphic image on the page, into a form. With any luck, the images will be legible to humans but not easily decipherable by OCR software, and will keep comment spam out of the site.

Posted by: toby | http:// | Wed Oct 19 00:55:00 2005

Why not implement OpenID?

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Wed Oct 19 09:33:51 2005

That is a future plan, yes. Though it'd involve coding a whole infrastructure to keep track of IDs. And OpenID doesn't solve the same problem; it'd be ridiculously cheap for a spammer to sign up for an ID once and use it to post a thousand comments.

Posted by: Graham | http://grudnuk.com/ | Wed Oct 19 13:45:37 2005

Fine by me. Though if you could fix the field layout so the content box is below everything else that'd be better.

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Wed Oct 19 17:19:37 2005

Do you mean have the captcha image below the comments form?

Posted by: Peter | http://www.frogworth.com/blog/ | Thu Oct 20 10:45:40 2005

Hi. My names Peter and I am a human. Actually *I* found that particular image quite tricky! So tricky I didn't even get it the first time. I had to reload to get another image. Woah!

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Thu Oct 20 10:50:24 2005

Yes, sometimes it happens that way. Though the vast majority of the time, the images are quite legible. Though the image generator is a work in progress and will probably be adjusted as time goes on.

Posted by: dondy tallewhekker | http:// | Sat Oct 22 04:48:02 2005

::chuckles::

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Note to spammers: This comment system applies the rel=nofollow attribute to the poster's URL and all links. Posting links to this page will not improve their search engine rankings.

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