These days, any site that has comments or lets users send email, must have some type of anti-spam system. The most common type is a captcha challenge. For me, it usually takes 2 or 3 tries (if not more) for me to get a challenge correct. I stumbled upon a WordPress plugin called WP Hashcash that uses a Javascript “challenge” to fight spam. The really cool part is that people that use standard browsers that have Javascript turned on (if you have Javascript turned off, you pretty much can’t see many cool sites), don’t see a challenge and can just comment normally. Automated systems haven’t been trained to actually run the Javascript on the comment pages therefore the plugin marks the comments as spam. The plugin is catching a ton of spam.
This is just too cool to have a system in place that (for now) combats spam without inconveniencing my readers!
Have you tried Akismet? from the makers of WP. Works like a charm, no browser challenge needed.
Funny your comment got tagged as spam (do you have Javascript turned off?). Akismet is turned on for my blog, but doesn’t seem to do a great job for me.
Then my comments got flagged as well! I need to take a closer look to see what’s up.
Will this get tagged as spam?
I’m interested in re-purposing this approach as a JS library if it works well here, it should work outside of WP.
I had to disable this plugin as it basically was tagging everything as spam. Akismet seems to be doing a fine job alone, so we’ll see.