Last night, I incorporated a captcha plugin (by Best Web Soft). Users will now be required to answer a simple math question before being allowed to post a comment.

I am very disappointed about having to do this. But since joining the RPG Blog Alliance, I have been receiving 100 or so spam comments every day. Another plugin, Akismet, has been catching these comments and tossing them into a spam folder. Each time I log in, I simply click “Empty Spam” and they all disappear. Akismet catches nearly 100% of them (over 5,000 to date) so they never make it through to the website, and to my knowledge there has never once been a false positive (no actual comments have been marked as spam). However, I can’t manually inspect over 100 spam comments a day and don’t won’t to risk having actual comments accidently removed, so I felt it was necessary to take this action.

I have some difficulty in using captcha systems that distort and otherwise attempt to obfuscate letters in order to fool spam bots, so I selected a system that asks users to answer a simple math question instead. I hope that you won’t find this overly annoying.

So far, the captcha plugin is working marvelously. There have been zero spam comments since it was installed and normal user comments are getting through just fine. Please let me know if you do have a problem. I’ll cross my fingers that this stops the problem without becoming a detriment.