A lot of spam

I have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on this site recently, working on the blog archives so that they could actually be filtered so anyone using the site was not stuck just with the most recent entry that they could access via the front page.

The filtering page now makes use of AJAX updates, so it is very easy for anyone to filter the entries, either by category or by date range.

However, when filtering using my new code, I discovered one of the blog posts had 29 comments (it previously had one!). I went into the blog post and discovered many ads for pharmecutical websites and other forms of complete spam in all the comments. This is completely my own fault, as my comments form was completely unprotected with no kinds of validation whatsoever.

I took some basic steps to rectify this introducing some Javascript validation so that fields could not be left empty, but this does not protect against Spambots as they fill in everything you offer them anyway! Therefore some more heavy duty protection was in order

I have been more than familar with captcha through using it on Drupal at work but thought it might not be so easy to set up on a non-drupal site. I was very surprised to see that about 5 minutes after signing up for reCaptcha, I had a bright red captcha box in fully working order on my blog making spam (hopefully) a thing of the past. I fully recommend all you site owners out there to make use of reCaptcha, it's very easy and doing a great service too - it helps to digitise books where words have not been automatically translatable through scanning.

Although it was fantastic that it was so easy to set up, anyone with an aesthetic eye can see that a great hulking red box does not really tie in with the colour scheme of this website. Therefore it was pleasant to discover that after reading the api documentation, all that was required to change the theming to a nice plain appearance was 3 lines of javascript.

Since applying this, I have had zero spam posts on my website. I think everyone should make use of reCaptcha wherever possible and do themselves, their readers and the world's digital library a big favour.