Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs

One can decide that I hate Akismet. It’s not so. Akismet is a great system developed by the great programmers, and I highly respect it.

However, I think that the idea of a centralized database doesn’t work. Time to time, I write about the problems in the blog. And obviously, I refer to Akismet as it is the main player in this field.

Most likely, when I write “Akismet”, I just use the short word instead of the long phrase “the idea of a centralized database to filter comment and trackback spam”, and I don’t want to offence the Akismet developers.

From Wikipedia:

A Trackback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. … Some individuals or companies have abused the TrackBack feature to insert spam links on some blogs. This is similar to comment spam but avoids some of the safeguards designed to stop the latter practice. As a result, TrackBack spam filters similar to those implemented against comment spam now exist in many weblog publishing systems. Many blogs have stopped using trackbacks because dealing with spam became too burdensome.

I’ve already published an idea how to resurrect trackbacks: trackbacks should be performed through an intermediate, not directly. (For details, read this post, “decline and fall of the trackbacks; rise and resurrection of the trackbacks”.) Unfortunately, such protection depends on a third party.

And here is yet another idea, which doesn’t require an external service.

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I know 3 types of spam in WordPress, and speculate one more:

* comment spam
* trackback (or pingback) spam
* registration spam
* plugin spam

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As the most popular blogging platform, WordPress is a target of spammers. If you are an average blogger, your everyday job is to delete spam from you blog, even if you have an anti-spam tool installed.

The default antispam weapon is Akismet. But I dislike it. More rambling follows later, now just google for “akismet sucks”.

What I develop, use myself and highly recommend to everyone is …

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