I just wanted to let everyone know that I have made a small but important change to the way comments are now handled within this blog. I had installed Akismet for WordPress to thwart comment spamming attempts, and although it is a very good plugin and has been very effective, it wasn’t until recently that some of the spam messages would filter through.
I did the responsible thing and let Akismet know that these new messages are also spam (if you are familiar with how Akismet works, you would know that all spam messages are filtered against a known list that is stored on Akismet’s servers, and new spam that filters through can be reported so this list is updated all the time), but the fact that these spam messages are filtering through at an increasing rate goes to show that the comment spammers are picking up their game.
So I have added a Captcha system, I’m sure most of you out there are familiar with how this system works. A random image with random characters will appear below the text area and you will need to enter in the characters shown for your post to submit successfully. This extra step in human intervention will ensure that only humans with (somewhat?) good intentions will have their messages submitted, while the automated spamming comment bots out there will be knocked back. And for those who hire humans to submit comment spam, well their efforts will be slowed down and most probably filtered by Akismet which is still enabled, which will allow me to counter these attempts.
Oh, and I changed the theme of the blog as well :) Something a little more Mac-Web2.0ish. The side menu is collapsable and draggable as well.