Block 99% of Blog Comment Spam with the reCAPTCHA Plugin

The Akismet filtering service has done a wonderful job of keeping spammy link lists off the pages of my blog. Unfortunately, it flags a false positive every few days, throwing one of my readers’ legitimate comments into the trash bin.

As Martial Development continues to grow in popularity, the task of sorting delicious ham from rotten spam becomes ever more loathsome. I don’t have time to read the hundreds of Viagra/porn/refinance advertisements that spam-bots post here every day.

My solution is to block the comment spam on the front end, instead of filtering it on the back end. Last week, I installed the reCAPTCHA Wordpress plugin.

reCAPTCHA is a novel twist on the CAPTCHA, an automated test to screen out bots posing as humans. Whereas most CAPTCHAs consist of useless picture puzzles, reCAPTCHA performs a practical service. The blurry words in each challenge are extracted from real printed books, and your answers are used to convert these books into electronic text.

When you leave a comment on my blog, you are supporting the public library!

Since installing reCAPTCHA, I have received no comment spam whatsoever. I now have more time to delete pingbacks from splogs and MFA sites, read the email spams sent via my contact form…and occasionally write a new post.

Yes, CAPTCHAs are annoying stumbling blocks that can interfere with reader participation. Still, if you have something interesting or important to say, I hope this minor inconvenience will not dissuade you from sharing it with us.