My blog seems to have received heaps of comment spam over the last couple of weeks and it seems I’m not alone. So I did the open source thing and took matters into my own hands!
I’ve hacked the source for pebble.jar and the comments html to create a “Answer a simple maths question” captcha for comments (check out the Comments form to see it in action). Other blog systems seem to be using this kind of approach with some success so I thought I’d give it a go.
So far it’s working a treat! And it will be a pain for them to write a screen scaper to pull out the maths question, solve it, then submit it. For those interested in the mods, you can get a zip of the diff, along with a prebuild jar from here.
Enjoy your spam-free comments… At least for now…