You drove me to do this . . . .

It is a great thing when your blog gets read by a growing audience, but not when that audience is nothing but a bunch of scummy spammers!

Yup, the hallowed pages of Contingency Design has been attacked and has been subject to a growing fan base of spammers. Most of which seem to be coming from Russia. Come on, I am all about foreign relations and I am all about forgive and forget about the cold war, but this ain’t helpin brother!

But at least these guys have a sense of humor.  It really struck me weird when I got this post to my blog from mail.ru,

Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!

The body of the message is almost benign in nature, but weird. But then I looked at the link from the name and this is where these guys get talented. If course I will not expose their entry as that would give some free spam time. 

But since I got this first hit only 10 days ago, it is like a team of war ships have zeroed in on me. The amount of spam hits have been almost amazing. Do these guys really have nothing better to do? I say, round up all the spammers and we will find that hole in Sparta and throw them all in.

You WordPress set up comes with Akismet for spam filtering. But it is only a program, and people continue to write programs that are smarter then the computer. Until we find a cure from Spammers, we need to maintain a process of human intervention. 

So I have broken down and installed reCAPTCHA. If you are not familiar, reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.

. . .

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

. . .

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

. . .

I myself am not really a fan of CAPTCHAs, especially Google’s!  Man, could they make that any freaking harder to read that crap? So, instead of installing the standard CAPTCHA service, I installed a great WordPress plug in Simple Spam Filter by TanTanNoodles. Simple Spam Filter has existed for a little while now as a basic spam filter, but they have recently updated it to make use of CAPTCHA security via reCAPTCHA.

So there it is. The gates have been locked. This service leverages the power of spam pattern recognition, so if you are leaving legitimate comments, you are safe from reCAPTCHA. But if you are a spammer, well, prove that you are human. 

Well, lets see how it goes. I am hoping that this will work and I don’t have to initiate registration and up from CAPTCHA. 

Happy blogging everyone!  Oh yeah, GO OBAMA!