After years of fighting spam and vandalism on my WL-HDD site – involving making many complex spam rules and heavily restricting user’s editing permissions, I have finally found a more ideal solution to the problem – reCAPTCHA.
Many of you will already be familiar with reCAPTCHA via other websites – where it is often used to block spam comments on blogs or on user registration forms. Basically, it requires you to recognize two words in a picture and to type them into an input box as a means of proving that you are a human and not a spambot. You can see an example of reCAPTCHA in action in the screenshot provided.
I currently have the plugin setup so that it is activated on:
- New user registration
- Creation of new pages
- Anonymous edits that contain new external links
- Brute-force password cracking
If you are interested in implementing the plugin on your own blog, there is more information available here. It is a very straightforward and simple procedure.
