My wonderful hosts enabled FreeType support this morning, and as a result a Captcha has been implemented with the comment form. It’s simple enough – simply copy the characters displayed in the image to get your comment submitted. And if you mistake, never fear, your comment is not lost and you can just try again.
This should bring an end to my anti-spam woes, and consequently instant commenting has been re-enabled on all posts from the last 7 days. Older ones still need pre-moderation, for now, while I assess how it’s all working.
Thanks for bearing with me as the spammers descended. Message to the vultures – it’s over, go home. And no, you don’t get your ball back.
This fucking rocks.
At least I can read the verification code on this blog and over on Babbleblog! Other sites have terrible ones that are just pointless as you can’t even read the first letter!
Good job
WooYay! No more spam now, ever!
Although where’s the audio file of you reading out the letters for the blind?
Heh, I did think of that, and I do regret that it renders the comment field inaccessible to some people. But my rationale is that spam and\or obsessive moderation makes the system inaccessible to everyone.
well this is well weird. maybe they should add like a secret quest that you have to fulfill to enable the ability to leave comments.
No spam!! I’m free although Rose didnt die
this is a good idea, but you should have a way to turn off the verification thing for people you trust
The only way of doing that would be by creating members for regular commenters such as yourself… I considered it before but it kinda messed up the profiles and also stopped people linking back to their sites.
I might rethink a lot of things when I eventually get round to redesigning – scheduled for "after exams"!
Yeah I need to find a good font to use on the babble captcha – but as I’m logged in all the time, I never see it.
One more question
is it case sensitive?
you might want to put the answer to that on the page the explain link goes to
If/When you redesign will the whole site be changing and become a new face or just certain new features and edits?
Alex – good point, it’s not, and I’ll add that to the page.
Rob – the plan is to do a complete redesign at some point, but it’ll be a lot of work so I can’t say when!