Greetings. I'm Eric Litman, I'm an Internet entrepreneur, investor and executive, and I run a mobile ad and analytics company called 
Admin: math comment spam plugin disabled
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 11th, 2007 7:36pm
I’ve been running a plugin that displayed a simple math question (i.e. “what is 2 + four”) as part of my comments form, but apparently it worked on a far more limited set of browsers than I had realized. So consider it gone and comment math-free to your heart’s content. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Update: coComment is gone, too. Simplicity prevails. My blog isn’t nearly popular enough to be able to afford missing comments.
[tags]admin,wordpress[/tags]
brad on Friday, June 15th, 2007
yeah, this is a hard thing – making it hard for the robots to post, without creating too high of a hurdle for legitimate posters.
And apparently the robot army is getting better at reading those annoying jumbled text things, so they are making them harder and harder to read… hard enough that people are having a hard time reading them.
I am trying to come up with a good solution for my site, as I would like to allow visitors to message authors directly. But I don’t want them to get inundated with spam and crap.
So I have been trying to think, what are humans good at that computers are really bad at? I like the math idea – but computers are _really_ good at that.
Computers have a hard time with subjective, judgment-based questions, and also with rhyming.
So, my first idea was to use rhyming. You ask “what word rhymes with X’, and offer a drop-down list of 5 words, only one of which rhymes with X.
The problem with this though is that words are finite. It would not be too tall of an order to create a database of all rhyming words and compare the 5 options given.
The other possibility I came up with, and have half rejected, would be to post, say, 5 pictures of peoples faces… some happy, some angry some sad. Then ask the poster to choose, you know, which face is the happiest.
This has the benefit of being kinda fun, and personal – you are picking faces and people. But, if there are only 5 options, it wouldn’t be too hard for a robot to play the odds, back-buttoning and trying again till it got the right one.
But then, the thing is, if you – or you and a few others – are the only ones using a particular method, it should be pretty effective. AuthorsBookshop is not so big that it would be worth anyone’s time to build a robot to spam just my site.
Anyway, I am getting to the point where I will have to decide some measure to take. Ill be interested to see what works and how well.