Spam No More

As some of you may have read, my blogging system, Movable Type (MT), was under heavy attack by spammers last week. The spammers forced me to take drastic measures to fight back. In addition to all the anti-spam filters on my latest MT build, I decided to implement the requirement to re-type a word in an image to post comments. This method will stop 100% of spambots unless a super bored spammer actually got off his lazy ass to post a comment himself. The passphrase security check ensures that only humans may post comments. Even if a spammer does decide to post, all comments are held for moderation so that the public will not have to suffer from any idiotic spam messages.

Adding the passphrase check was an easy implementation under the new MT 3.2. First, I downloaded the HMPassphrase plugin and uploaded the files to my server. I spent about 10 minutes configuring the settings of the new plugin. Then I completed the implementation by creating a small image and adding the extra passphrase field to the comment forms. Due to the business of the commercial web site I maintain, it is my priority to ensure the commenting system is always available for visitors and comments are spam free (see site here). For now, I am just using one static image for the passphrase. I plan to beef up the system with randomly generated images in the future.