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Thursday, October 30, 2008

Come and get me…

Is there an alternative to captchas? I’m hoping so.

It’s not like many people even know about this blog, but I’m going to run a test.

I don’t like Captchas. Don’t like tests of intelligence to respond to a blog. And I really don’t like spam in my post comments. People should be free to respond without having to be known, anonymously, so long as they’re respectful to others and the post in general. You never have to agree, but appreciate that we all live here online cumulatively to the health and future of the internet.

Yet when you see dozens of comment spams like “hey, great post - come here for viagra”, generated principally by rogue robot programs, you can easily see how this pest can paralyse a healthy conversation. Captchas was the first, best line of defence against spambots, but it’s not a natural way to communicate. Comments slowed considerably, to a crawl.

So I’m opening up the site and testing one solution - Askimet, principally for Wordpress, but now an extension for ExpressionEngine. Wordpress’s lack of separation between content and programming and poor caching preclude it from being a serious corporate cms, but the Askimet facility of WP makes sense.

If a member leaves a comment, the comment is sent to the online Akismet service at akismet.com. It’ll quickly be evaluated (microseconds - hardly any delay) and a verdict of either ’spam’ or ‘okay’ is sent back. If a comment is considered ’spam’, its status is set to ‘closed’. If a comment is considered ‘okay’, the comment is posted normally. I can then block IP ranges if I care to or batch delete them, but they never get put online.

In theory - let’s give it a try.