Sincere apologies to anyone who's visually impaired and reading this weblog. After months of putting up with it, and despite the admirable firefighting efforts of the MT-Blacklist plugin, I finally became sick of spending time deleting comment spam and installed SCode.

So now whenever you comment you are asked to type in a human readable yet bastard spammer unreadable number. If this causes problems for anyone, please email me your comment (anything at tomhume dot org should get through) and I'll post it here myself.

I had forlornly hoped that Google might address the problem (as I understand it comment spam basically exists to upgrade PageRankings) but twas not to be...

Comments

[Dave Ph]

Looks pretty decent to me. Will you report your findings?

[Dan]

Works fine and easy to use.

[Chris Davies]

Thats a really, really poor capcha.

I did an experiment, whereby applied threshholding to the image, inverted it and fed the result to gocr (a free OCR tool) and it spat out the right answer in character form. The whole operation took bugger all cpu time, on a 1Ghz Via C3-2.

If I were a comment spammer, I could easily script this, and flood any blog with spam that was protected by such a mechanism.

[Tom Hume]

Chris

I appreciate what you're saying, but comment spam has stopped dead since I put this on.

If it starts again... I'll have to find something new. For now, it works. :)

Tom