It’s been nearly two months since I switched halfblog.net from Posterous over to WordPress, and I’ve been generally very positive about the change, with some reservations. The truth is, I don’t think I will be recommending it so strongly to potential new bloggers any longer (as I have done at Social Media Surgeries).
The various reasons probably justify a separate blog post, but one concern is looming particularly large right now…
I had a typical spam comment on my logo design post from yesterday:
thank you for the wonderful posts its my glad to see such a nice resource…
Deleted now, of course.
I had a second comment (on my post about an orb weaver spider I saw, which actually gets pretty good search traffic), only this time the spammer dumped his entire spammy payload in a single comment.
I’ve deleted the original comment, but am reproducing it here for, um, posterity?
Last week there was a blog post by LukeW proposing a sliding alternative to CAPTCHAs:
[…] the sign up form on They Make Apps uses a slider that asks people to: “show us your human side; slide the cursor to the end of the line to create your account.” Moving the slider to the right completely submits the form and triggers error validation just like a standard Submit button would.
But why stop there? I just spotted this super geeky variation on the same idea on the Adafruit Industries blog:
It seems that it’s their own creation, and is offered as a WordPress plugin:
We are thrilled to release a solve-the-resistor CAPTCHA plugin for WordPress! This plugin will draw a random 5% or 10% resistor and four color band sliders beneath it. The commenter needs to match the colors on the sliders to the colors on the resistor. Commenters don’t actually need to know how to read resistors, but this will help them as they post comments on site that use this plugin.
Resisty – Resistor CAPTCHA – solve the resistor values to post a comment!
Of course, as with the slider alternative the resistor reading could still be easily worked around using crowd-sourced labour, but it’s still a fun idea!
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