Stop spam, help the human race
You may have noticed a new 'Captcha' widget on my site to test your 'humanness' and stop spammers. A few months ago I read a very interesting article in Wired about some work at Carnegie Mellon University by Luis von Ahn, creator of the original Captcha. The premise of the article is that humans are better suited to handle certain pattern recognition tasks than computers but in order to coax people into doing the tasks, they need to be stimulated somehow, ie make it fun. reCaptcha is exactly that, getting humans to help discern some scanned words that computers can not recognize.
The next-gen test presents two skewed words bisected by a line, making machine deciphering even harder. Both are taken from the Internet Archive's project to scan public-domain books. One word is known to the computer; the other couldn't be read by the Archive's scanners, so when you type it in you're doing a tiny bit of work for the project.
Check out reCaptcha.net to learn more about the project and how you can fight spam and help the human race.
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Oct 12, 2007 at 6:48 PM
I think this is brilliant idea to use this captcha spam protection it will help You protect Your blog from auto script spam and spammers who write 2-3 words to put their link. Keep up the good work. Regards
Oct 17, 2007 at 1:45 PM
This is a great tool to stop some robot spam but it still unable to stop human spammer from abusing your site.
Regards.
Oct 26, 2007 at 2:24 PM
That does sound like a great tool. I have started using captcha on several of my sites, and it does a great job of stopping spam being sent through on my forms.
Whats worrying though is that I was reading about this, and it said that within a few years, the spammers might find away around the current image based captcha, and that new developments would make captcha more human related, such as showing several photos of parts of Zebras, and then asking the user to type in the animal they see.
Oct 26, 2007 at 5:02 PM
What's more worrying Alex, is that people like yourself try to use legitimate looking comments to provide link backs to your site in order help increase your page rank. Thankfully I carefully watch comments on my site and do my best to keep the spammers and scammers out.
Derrick
Nov 01, 2007 at 2:16 PM
Yes I left a comment, and yes I added my URL into the field asking for the URL.
This time though, I left it out.
As for trying to increase my backlinks and PR, what would have been the point of that on this page ?? Thread is less than a month old and PR=0.
Not sure what I am to gain from this, but anyway, its your blog, so delete my comments if you want.
Many other blogs use the Nofollow tag in the links, so maybe you might want to use this as well is this is a thing that you feel strongly about.
Nov 01, 2007 at 2:52 PM
Alex,
Anytime I see a post with a url that links to a site that appears to be driven by getting views, and not a personal site, then my spam sense kicks in. Your site my be legit, it looks so, but it could also be that you're hoping to drive traffic OR getting external links pointing into a site you've developed.
This thread is new and the PR is low, but my site gets decent hits and PR so it's not entirely out of question that backlinking was the intent. As to why I don't use the nofollow tag, it's because I do believe in helping out others, and part of that is letting legit links exist in my domain to help other developers out there get decent search ranks and to help people find useful information.
If you have a personal site that lists the sites you've developed, the work you've done, I'd be more than happy to have that link on my site.
Nov 02, 2007 at 3:36 AM
Derrick,
I agree with you 100% regarding the problem with Spamming on message boards, forums, blogs, etc. There are many blogs and message boards that I use frequently, and it seems as though spamming on these is something that is increasing on a daily basis. There are even a couple of message board sites that I have used where they have actually had to turn off the ability for users to reply or comment on threads. Its a pity when this happens, as it really stops the genuine posters from sharing comments and information.
Some of these "spammers" post nothing apart from hundreds of links in their posts to viagra type sites. Its a shame that real and informative comments get buried beneath crap like that.
Personal site wise - I don't have one myself. My main site is something I have been constantly building and working on for the past 5 years, so though it doesn't have anything to do with my personally, it is one that I have shed blood, sweat and tears over.
No offence was meant by my previous comment, and I apologise if it appeared slightly "angry". It wasn't intended to be.
Sites like yours are an excellent resource for information, and yours is one I do have bookmarked. With the internet constantly envolving and changing on a daily basis, its sites such as this that help me to keep upto date with whats going on in the cyber world.
Keep up the great work.
Dec 14, 2007 at 10:19 AM
Thanks for providing the link.