[wp-hackers] Anti spam idea

[C. Rummel]

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 19:09:36 -0500, Mark Jaquith
<mark.wordpress at txfx.net> wrote:
> I wrote some WP code that does this... but only if a comment has been
> moderated.  Thus, if a user accidentally trips into moderation, he will
> have a chance to moderate his own comment by completing the CAPTCHA.

So this way you give manually submitting spammers the chance to get where 
they want to get? Not so good, I think.

The Problem with CAPTCHAs is resources. It is not advisable to always show 
a CAPTCHA it has to be created everytime. With hightraffic sites your machine 
is busy generating CAPTCHAs all day long. So either you create a cache of 
pregenerated CAPTCHAs or you move it to the comment-preview page that 
only gets called if somebody is really writing a comment. I know some people 
how stopped using CAPTCHAs because their machines couldn't cope with the
additional load.

An then, again, there is the OCR-problem... Most CAPTCHAs can be read 
and guessed correctly with >70% chance.

Chris