Now with CAPTCHAs!

Posted by Steve on May 28th, 2006

Even though certain people will undoubtedly find this post as boring as my previous post, I am nonetheless pleased to announce that I’ve finally implemented CAPTCHAs on our blog. CAPTCHAs are those small images of distorted words, random letters, or numbers that, among other things, reduce blog comment spam by verifying that a human being is “behind the wheel.” CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, though I’m not about to go into exactly what that means! (You’re welcome, Kim!) Read the Wikipedia link and get back to me if you have questions.

Anyway, for the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with several simplistic, home-grown, CAPTCHA-like ideas to foil the spam-bots. And honestly, it really doesn’t take much to confuse them! But I finally decided to invest the time to implement a full-scale, long-term solution. The image associated with this article is an example of a CAPTCHA generated by the AuthImage plugin for WordPress. I had to make some minor modifications to the original code as I found many of the “words” very illegible, which sort of defeats the point. By tweaking a few things in the code and a few things in the configuration, I was able to improve the human-readability of the resulting images but continue to make them very difficult for a computer to decipher.

To see the CAPTCHAs in action, leave a comment to this post. You can also try out our contact page which I’ve also adapted to use AuthImage. Finally, here are some real examples of the CAPTCHAs that AuthImage is now generating on our site:

This entry was posted by Steve on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 7:48 am and is filed under Internet/Web, Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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10 Responses to “Now with CAPTCHAs!”

1. tim Says:
   June 1st, 2006 at 1:09 pm

   Appropos of your new implementation of captchas, the WSJ has an article about them.

2. Steve Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 4:47 pm

   Kim: Now you know how I feel when I read… er, skim… your knitting blog!

   Sylke: Yes, that is exactly why I finally made the jump to CAPTCHAs. Akismet is fantastic at what it does, but you still have to purge all the spam on a regular basis. So far — knock-on-wood, fingers crossed, pinch of salt over the shoulder — I’ve had, I think, just a single spam comment get posted (and most likely this was simply done by a real person willing to type in the CAPTCHA). So, the initial results are promising….

3. kim Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 1:38 pm

   Um, could you translate that last comment into English por favor?

4. Steve Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 5:24 am

   I’ve further modified the AuthImage code and configuration file to support randomizing over several different font colors. (I’ve updated the sample CAPTCHAs in the post accordingly.)

5. Sylke Says:
   May 30th, 2006 at 8:35 am

   Aha, another item that I might implement too; I’m soooo fed up with deleting spam, even if it’s caught by Akismet first.
   See, there are people who are interested after all :))

6. Tim Says:
   May 28th, 2006 at 8:39 pm

   Dude,

   You are in so much trouble. You are on your own.

7. kim Says:
   May 28th, 2006 at 8:35 pm

   My word was ‘yech’.

   ‘Nuf said.

8. Steve Says:
   May 28th, 2006 at 2:39 pm

   Clearly, one of the advantages to hosting your blog with one of the blog services on the web (e.g., blogger.com) is that you get nice features like CAPTCHAs and spam filtering for free and with virtually no effort on your part!

9. Betty C Says:
   May 28th, 2006 at 9:52 am

   I think this is pretty interesting! I didn’t know these had a name, to me they were just codes. Nice background on them too…

10. Steve Says:
    May 28th, 2006 at 8:47 am

    Testing out our new CAPTCHAs!