Until today I was using Methylblue’s Simple Captcha. It had worked very well for a long time, but over the past couple of weeks I have began to receive comment spam again. The spam was somehow getting past both the captcha, and despite being obvious spam, it was also getting past Akismet.

Thankfully, I have a third level of defense in that comments go into moderation. I never disabled that option despite having both a captcha and Akismet running on this blog.

Here are some ideas about how the spam was getting through..

1. Spam bots are exploiting a weakness in Wordpress v2.2.2 (I’ll finally upgrade after this post)
2. Someone has discovered a way around certain kinds of captchas
3. They could have simply found a way around this one specific captcha due to its popularity

In any case, I have switched to an image captcha.

Please note that the Flock browser has a minor issue with this new image captcha, and I do not know if this problem is also present in Firefox. When you click on the box to enter the data from the captcha, the text box immediately above it instantly gains focus. This prevents you from typing into the captcha box.

An easy work around for this issue is to use the Tab key on your keyboard to cycle through the text fields instead of manually clicking to move from name, to URL, and so forth.

Hopefully this will fix the spam issue.. if not, then I suppose that there are other steps that I can take.

~Steph

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