CAPTCHAs can be perfectly termed as a necessary evil. CAPTCHA is one of the effective ways of detecting spam through your website design. Blog posts, comments, registration forms etc. compulsorily demand CAPTCHAs to be protected from spammers. Nobody loves spam, but nobody loves CAPTCHA too. thus, necessary evil is a proper term. If you don’t use CAPTCHA, you might have to spend hours and hours detecting the spam messages and deleting them. But there are alternatives to spam too.
Firstly you need to know that CAPTCHA is not more a solution now. Spamming based on human power is in the web which will soon balance CAPTCHA’s abilities. Below are few alternatives to CAPTCHA which can be considered.
- Automated Detection – There are lot of plug-ins like SBlam, Mollom and Akismet which automatically detect, analyze and delete the spam messages. Integrate you blog with these plug-ins and save yourself from spam. Use of this plug-ins won’t waste your time for manually examining the posts and comments.
- Honeypot Method – this is a very unique and effective method of catching hold of spam comments. By this method, you can put an invisible box in the comment section. This box is visible to nobody but the automated softwares. If you mind any kind of data in this box, you know that it is a spam comment.
- Centralization of user base – Ask or request the users to sign up to your blog. This is give your blog a protection from spammers. They will find it hard to enter your blog. But make it easy for the users. Integrate Facebook Connect with your blog so that the users are registered in one or two clicks.
- Time taken to comment – You can always keep a check on the time taken to comment by any user. If the comment is posted without even taking seconds, it is definitely a spam. But if the time taken to post the comment is around a minute or more, it is your users. Thus, even in this way you get to know whether it’s spamming or no.
