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Turing Test Added to Comments
by Aaron Smith on Monday, June 11 2007Blog spam is almost as rampant as email spam, and it’s starting to fester among the comments on our blog. To keep it from getting out of hand, I’m implementing a couple of changes that should slow down (if not stop) these common blog spamming techniques.
The first change is that TrackBacks are now turned off. This isn’t a huge deal, because they hadn’t been on since the blog’s beginning until recently. I turned them on last week, because I thought they might be useful. I see now that they’re mostly useful for spam, so now they’re back off.
The second, and more important change, is the addition of a Turing test when adding comments. Instead of using a captcha to verify that whatever entering a comment is a sentient being, the Turing test uses a natural language question. This should keep the automated scripts that post blog spam from doing so, because they can’t answer the question unless they’re designed to know the answer specifically for our blog comment form. And because that defeats the purpose of having an automated method of blog spamming, it should do the trick.
The question isn’t hard. In fact, because we’re just out to spoil the automated non-friendlies, we can even talk about it here. We’re often asked, "What do the G and W of GW Micro stand for?" G stands for Geoffray, Doug’s last name, and W stands for Weirich, Dan’s last name. They both share the company, and therefore both share the name.
Now, when you post a comment, one of the form items to fill out is a question asking what the G in our name stands for. Fill it out correctly (i.e. spelled right, with the first letter capitalized), and your comment will go through. Fill it out wrong, and your comment will not get posted.
Although this adds one more step (albeit rather small) to posting comments, it will keep the entries on track, and spamless. Oh, and if you’re a registered user, the question edit box will be filled in automatically.
