Captcha - thank the Christmas Spammers...

OK, so Christmas saw a surge in spam again, and I didn't want to spend my family holidays cleaning that stuff out of the moderation queue of the site's comments (I got, like, 30 a day or so, in addition to regular spam e-mails...). So, I added a captcha to this site. Captchas are these small images of skewed text that you are asked to read and type in at the bottom of the comment form.

Should you have problems with these captchas, please use the contact form and tell me what causes problems for you (contact form is captcha-free). I just did a quick implementation that is the least hassle to me, while not being too easy to hack (as in: I don't transmit the captcha's text meaning as part of the site code etc.), so there's room for improvement, which I'll do if I hear this isn't suitable.

Sorry, I didn't want to have to add captchas, but I have better things to do than play the click-away-spam-in-the-moderation-queue-game.

Reader Comments: (RSS Feed)

Dan writes: I dunno, what's stopping the spammers from just doing the capcha? Are we talking about blind spammers?

Uli Kusterer replies: ★ *chuckles* No, Dan. We're talking about people who try to automate their spam. The Captcha word gets changed randomly, so they can't just keep pumping their spam messages in with the same parameters.

Or E-Mail Uli privately.