Comments are back, hello Captcha’s!
After being motivated by a workmate (who when confronted by comment spam, hacked together a quick maths-based Captcha in an evening), I decided to install a Captcha plugin and re-enable comments.
(For the uninitiated, a Captcha is a “thing” that attempts to distinguish humans from computers - particularly handy for preventing comment spam)
I’ve gone with SecureImage as my Captcha. It requires the user to type in some random letters that are displayed in slightly distorted form for a comment to be posted. The plugin was nice and self-contained, some Captchas require the wordpress files to be hacked in various places, but all that was required was to drop the file into the “plugins” directory, then enable it through the WordPress interface.
One gotcha was the choice of font - by default, SecureImage expects to use a font called FreeSansBold. I don’t have this, and as a result got a blank image. Makes it unreasonably hard for the user to guess the random letters, in my opinion ;). Changing the default font fixed all that though.
So, welcome back comments!
January 11th, 2006 at 6:54 am
Lookin good Dasman. Just had to give it a burl. Bit hard to tell V from Y in mine. Had to reload the page to get a clearer one. But say goodbye to card games, buddy!
The captcha on my blog caught 22 spam attempts last night! Feels so good…