http://norman.walsh.name/2006/06/30/captcha 9 64 2006-06-30T08:35:59-04:00 $Date: 2006-06-30 09:08:59 -0400 (Fri, 30 Jun 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2006 Norman Walsh More fodder in the ongoing war against comment spam. Y'all can do math, right? Sir Francis Bacon He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the great innovator. I woke up to eighty some odd bits of comment spam this morning: free ringtones, drugs I don't need, and some miserable excuse to sell car insurance. I'm glad comments are moderated, because the evil bastards never got an ounce of Google juice for their efforts. But I still had to moderate all eighty of them. Waste of my time. So this morning I implemented a simple CAPTCHA system based on the ability to perform simple arithmetic operations on single digit numbers. Y'all can do that, right? I'm optimistic that that will slow the bots down, at least for a while. There's nothing to prevent the bot's heuristics from growing new capabilities, of course, but they'll still be moderated even ifwhen they do.