Thanks to Akismet and spam captchas like ReCAPTCHA, fighting comment spam is a bit easier now. However, spammers are also getting smarter. Nowadays aside from their spambots, they hire real people to post spam comments because they can answer and bypass spam captchas. They are also changing their style of commenting by leaving comments that read and sound like they were legitimate comments. These days we are seeing a new breed of comment spam.

Here’s one particular comment spam that I’ve received several times:

This comment was posted automatically using Blog Comment Poster software. Would you like to make serious money in this way of advertising too? So start today!

This one can be easily identified as spam, but what makes it interesting is the fact they are actually selling software that would automatically post comments on blogs. Although it may seem as an effective and convenient way of advertising it the comment says, I’m sure legit business owners wouldn’t jeopardize their business by using this method of advertising.

Here’s another one I received a couple weeks ago.

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem. I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Right away, I knew it was comment spam but unlike Aja who also got the same comment, I didn’t delete it right away but instead kept it in the comment queue for future reference. It was the first time I received this type of comment and I thought it was ingenious. I’m sure it has duped a few people. So if you ever receive this comment on your blog, NEVER reply! If you make the mistake of doing so, you’ll only be providing them with your precious email address and most likely be receiving more spam in your inbox.

Have you also received this same comment on your blog? What was your first reaction or response? If not, what would you have done if you received this comment? Would you have replied to the email address provided or would you have deleted it right away? Share your thoughts.

Do you guys know what a captcha is? Most bloggers would easily know the answer to this but for the ordinary person, it might sound like a million dollar question for a quiz show.

You’ve probably seen one but you just don’t know what its called. Captchas are those distorted letters and numbers that you see at the bottom of web registration forms. These are used as a form of verification and also to prevent spam abuse. Btw, CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” and is trademarked by the Carnegie Mellon University.

Here’s a little trivia: About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day.

There are so many types of captchas available and one of them is reCAPTCHA. So what is reCAPTCHA?

reCAPTCHA is not your ordinary captcha. Aside from keeping your website or blog free from spam, it also helps in digitizing books. How?

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Why use reCAPTCHA? It’s easy to use, secure and by using reCAPTCHA, not only will you fight spam but you can also help in digitizing books. Btw, I forgot to mention that reCAPTCHA is free and available as plugins for the following applications:

• WordPress
• MediaWiki
• phpBB
• Movable Type
• Drupal
• Symfony
• Typo3
• NucleusCMS
• ColdFusion

Check out or download reCAPTCHA.

Note: Installing captchas can cause problems with trackbacks. If you decide to install a captcha, check if your trackbacks still works.

I’m having problems with trackbacks. I just realized that I could send trackbacks but not receive them. Trackbacks won’t even run within my blog. Some of my recent posts include trackbacks to previous posts but none of them show up. This is the first time that I’ve had this type of problem. Never had problems with trackbacks before.

I’ve searched Google and have been trying to look for a fix for this problem to no avail. If anyone has a solution or knows how to fix this, I would greatly appreciate the help.

UPDATE:

Thanks to Jorge, I got it all figured out now. He pointed out that my spam captcha could be the culprit. I was using the Matriphe Keycode plugin to block spam comments and it also blocked my own trackbacks. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it right away. So with the spam captcha and Akismet both filtering and blocking all comments & trackbacks, trackbacks including my own was considered as spam and didn’t show up in the awaiting moderation queue or even in the Akismet spam section.

Anyways, after I deactivated the spam captcha, I tried to create a test trackback within my posts and I found it marked as spam by Akismet. As of now, I’m gonna drop the Matriphe Keycode plugin and just use Akismet by itself. Now it’s back to business.