Comments on: Fighting Spam Without Captcha

By: Vivien

Vivien — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:01:42 +0000

I wouldn’t call it a waste of time. It obviously works for me and worked for many others. It’s not the best anti-spam fighter, but I doubt there is one.

By: lol

lol — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:45:38 +0000

This whole concept is a waste of time for obvious reasons.

The only hope something like this has is if spammers don’t target it, and the spambots have horrible very VERY bad heuristics (Filling out hidden forms? Come on!).

By: Vivien

Vivien — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:26:05 +0000

oh, thanks for the heads up, Lauren. I haven’t had a chance to upgrade yet. Glad you realized soon enough.

By: LaurenMarie - Creative Curio

LaurenMarie - Creative Curio — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 21:41:26 +0000

Ooo, remember to update wp-comments-post.php when you upgrade! I forgot and didn’t get comments for a few days there… hope I didn’t miss anything important!

By: Vivien

Vivien — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:18:03 +0000

HURRRRAH! I’m so glad to hear that, Lauren. Glad it worked for you so well. You might still get a few spams here and there, ’cause there are some manually entered spam comments, but definitely not much. Thanks for the update.

By: LaurenMarie - Creative Curio

LaurenMarie - Creative Curio — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:07:47 +0000

Well even though it’s been less than 24 hours, I can say this method is working wonderfully! I haven’t seen a SINGLE spam comment since adding those extra fields. I wish I’d done it sooner! Thanks, Vivien!!!

By: Vivien

Vivien — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:59:10 +0000

Lauren, let me know please how did it work for you, it’s very frustrating to be getting so much spam. Hope it works for you as well as it did for me.

By: LaurenMarie - Creative Curio

LaurenMarie - Creative Curio — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:51:01 +0000

Hi Vivien! I really love how simple yet sneaky this anti-spam field is! I’ve just fixed my coding to reflect these changes and I would love it if it cut down my spam even by 50%. It’s quite disheartening to sign on to my blog after a few days of being away to find 400+ spam messages. I’m sure it was the slight popularity of one of my articles on Digg that got me this lovely attention from spam bots.

By: Vivien

Vivien — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 07:22:47 +0000

Reasonable question, Niyaz. But why wouldn’t the bots fill those hidden fields?

By: Niyaz PK

Niyaz PK — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:46:41 +0000

Very good idea.
But what if bots try and find out the hidden fields?

What if they did not fill those fields?
:)