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As a follow up to last week’s post (How to comment on this blog), this week I bring you the results of the no-captcha test.

After much spam slipping through reCAPTCHA, I decided to nix a captcha all together. Originally I thought that just requiring a field via javascript and doing no server side checking would work. This was silly of me, of course. The spammers, having the source code of WordPress, would just blindly submit a comment to any post, bypassing any client side JS checks I had in place.

The fix was to create a field that was not known to spammers like the reCAPTCHA is. Further, if it is appended via javascript, then it is even harder to automate. I wrote the simple-math plugin (have a copy!) and implemented it as follow:

• Turn off reCAPTCHA
• Add a field via javascript
• Ask a simple math question, validated in client side JS
• Only validate that the field exists, not that the math is right, on the server side

The jury is, and I’m fully vindicated. Here’s the stats:

	Hits	Comment Attempts	Comment Succeses	Attempts per Visit	Defense Success Rate
Feb 6th-12th	1191	57	17	4.79%	70.18%
Feb 12 11pm – Feb 13 10am	58	20	13	34.48%	35.00%
Feb 13th-Feb18th	1204	132	0	10.96%	100.00%

#spamstats td, #spamstats th {padding:4px;margin:5px}
#spamstats td {text-align:center;}
#spamstats tr:hover {background:#ccc}

The important thing to note is twofold. The first is that the average number of raw hits (excluding me, yahoo and google) was the same week to week. Further, the number of attempts went up 200% of which 100% were thwarted (Defense Success Rate). Again, I suspect this is all possible because it’s not easy, nor worth while (it’s OK, plip isn’t a big blog, I know…sniff) to automate spamming against one off solutions like mine.

I should note that I used the free version of Splunk to garner the ad hoc stats for this post. As I was hemming and hawing on whether to count cookies or IPs or hits, it wasn’t worth while to use the old school command line style stats. Splunk scoffs at this level of stats and reporting. Really, it’s above it, but will happily crank out what you ask for it with ease. Here’s a purty graph:

Caveat Emptor: I work at Splunk.