So, like most people who have blogs out there in the wild frontiers of the internet, heiseheise.com has been being spammed since practically 2-3 weeks after I created it. Thanks to me not using a robots.txt (not that spammers have the courtesy to read those) I was quickly overwhelmed by massive amounts of sex links, pharmaceutical links, and www.the-best-hamster-cages.com (yes, I thought they were kidding too).

However, due to my research into trying to implement a CAPTCHA on my business’s server (which is suddenly getting spammed far worse than I ever have been) I came across a nifty little tool made specifically to attach to WordPress that not only tells whether a comment poster is animal, mineral, or robot, but it also helps the book-digitizing world by putting up 2 words – one word to verify human-status, and the other word being one that a book digitizing program for the re-CAPTCHA people wasn’t able to properly translate. So, the program assumes that if the human got the first, easy word right, it probably got the second, harder word right too, and sends that back to re-CAPTCHA.

So go ahead and post a comment on the blog – you’re not only making me feel loved, you’re also helping out the digital world!

UPDATE 2/20/08: Since there was still about 10% of the original spam getting through, I removed the plugin entirely and just use Askimet instead, which actually goes through a database of spam typologies and updates itself automatically. Since then, not a one has gone through – so much that I’ve even disabled moderation on the blog, so people’s comments show up right away.