I knew that you could! I was spammed big time this weekend. Why does it seem to happen when you are away and unable (or unwilling to take the time) to check things on your site? Well, after deleting 45 spam comments from the weekend, I decided I needed something a little more heavy-duty than Kitten’s Spam Words, which is what I’ve been using. So I installed AuthImage. Now when you want to leave a comment, it is necessary to type in a code that is randomly generated and displayed as an image. I know it is a bit inconvenient, but it beats a lot of the other alternatives. Let’s hope this kills off the spam.
You see, Kitten’s Spam Words works fine for known spam. The problem is that much of the spam is the address slightly changed or the domain name slightly changed or the title slightly changed. So I am constantly updating the spam list in this fashion. Bots and other automatically generated spam have a heyday with this because there is little validation going on.
AuthImage goes about spam filtering in a different manner. When you click on the link to leave a link, the system generates a random group of numbers and letters called a “code”. It then takes this code and creates an image that contains the code. For a comment to be validated, the author has to enter the code shown in the image. Since the bots nor the automated spam can’t input a valid code (or at least have a very slim chance of entering the right code) their comments are not validated.
