Captcha? Каптча? カプチャ?

soma lkzx — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:40:12 -0800

Is using a Latin-alphabet captcha accessible across languages/character sets? I'm designing a site which will hopefully deal with people worldwide, across a ton of languages and alphabets. Is it realistic to use an out-of-the-box captcha solution, even though they're all based on the Latin alphabet? Are the characters universally recognizable? Easy to enter on everyone's keyboard?

I don't think the site is going to be spam central or anything, and I'll gladly strip it down to numbers-only to give bots a little road bump, I'd just rather have a little protection in place rather than nothing. Alternatives I've come across (math equations, 'common sense' questions) mostly seem silly or more trouble than they're worth, but I'm open to suggestions.

Spam-b-gone

y6y6y6 — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 15:29:47 -0800

Seeking comment spam uber advice. I recently started a new website. Within days of talking about the under-construction site on my blog I started getting comment spam on the new site. Okay. Sure. I know it's all done by robots so hardly a surprise. And I wanted to start playing with captchas anyway, so I put one of those (freecap) in place. All that did was slow the spam down. Slowed it down a lot to be sure, but still not enough. Either they're brute-forcing the word list, using a middle-man attack, or OCRing the image.

For the first option I've already created my own word list. For the second I'm not sure what to do. And for the third I'm reluctant to obscure the image more. Good luck right? Ideas?

Now, after spending several hours of reading webpages about securing and breaking captchas, I've decided a) I already know more about this than I wanted to, b) I haven't even started to learn about other spam prevention methods, and c) I'm not much closer to solving my comment spam problem. I'm a geek, so learning about hacks is fun and all, but I'd really rather be doing content creation. So I'm hoping someone else can point me to the good stuff.

So I'm asking for some personal experiences with beating comment spammers. What works and what doesn't. If not captchas, then what?

To make things harder - I want to use whatever technique I settle on at all of my sites, and one of those sites wouldn't really work with user registration.

Also - I'd prefer to code a solution myself, so I'm really more interested in strategies that work rather than off-the-shelf products.

Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with captchas

Captcha? Каптча? カプチャ?

Spam-b-gone