Comment spam calls for CAPTCHA!

• November 21st, 2007
• Joseph Crawford
• 8:07 AM (GMT-5)
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From the day I started this site I wondered if I would have to take any precautions for comment spam.  I installed the Askimet plug-in for wordpress and made all comments have to be moderated.  To this day I have received almost 10,000 spam comments which has led to a lot of work in reviewing the comments and making sure the ones marked spam really were spam.

I have decided to integrate a CAPTCHA program but not just any.  I am using reCAPTCHA which is a free system for everyone to use.  The difference between this system and others is that by using this you are actually helping digitize books that were written before they every thought of digitizing books.  Why not help a good cause at the same time as protecting my blog from spam?

I am not sure if integrating this will make the site get even less comments or not.  I know how people generally do not like these things but I am giving it a shot.  If comments slow down or it does not deem itself useful then I will remove it.