I only get a few comments on most of my posts. Others don’t have any at all. But sometime ago, there was a deluge of them, of course, by spam bots. And the few hours I spent on this blog (I have a day job, remember) were eaten up mostly with scanning the comments and picking the spams and the not-spams.
This forced me to look up the net and search for a captcha plugin. I found the Simple CAPTCHA and thought it cool enough to use on my blog. The spam was reduced to almost zero. What remained were those left by pathetic human spammers who were probably paid by the number of backlinks they could output. Of course, spam comments are easy to spot.
Simple CAPTCHA thus made my amateur blogger life easier for a while. Then, I began receiving comments from other bloggers who find the Simple CAPTCHA kind of annoying. I knew it! That’s why I inserted the text ‘annoying security code’ before it to warn them about this plugin. You see, the plugin requires the commenter to read the letters/digits in the captcha box and type it on the textbox beside it, just like any regular captcha. The thing however is the letters/digits are so hazy sometimes that you have to bring your eyes closer to the monitor to discern them.
So, I took off for another search. I found this really cool graphical captcha called Ajax Fancy Captcha. It requires the commenter to drag a particular little icon-sized graphic, one among 5 choices, into the circle to the right. I really liked this plugin because of the cool and novel look. I tested it on my other (inactive) blog and it worked very beautifully. However, in this blog, it didn’t work. Sigh.
Now, I’m trying out this WP Captcha Free plugin. No, it’s not about the captcha being free of charge (although it is in fact free). It’s a plugin that keeps the spam bots at bay without the need for a captcha. As there are no graphics involved in this, I have no way of knowing if it works or not. There’s only one way to find out, of course. I’ll be checking this out for a few weeks and see how it fares.
Note: A lot of my friends tell me to use Akismet. I have no idea why I’m presently averse to using the Akismet plugin which is right under my nose all the time. Anyway, let’s just say I’m taking my time trying out whatever is out there. If all else fails, there’s always Akismet to fall back on.