You sure give us lots to think about, Glenda! Nice one.

Moderating first time comment makers takes a step toward what Tim suggests, verifying the address represents a real person.

Combining those two is great for those of us with blogs. However, my irritation is with all of the big high traffic services who simply can’t afford that level of verification.

CAPTCHAS (you’re right about upper case) are popping up everywhere and presenting barriers for all sorts of people with disabilities. There’s an ever increasing number of barriers being built.

Tim might be right about something like OpenID being an answer, but that’s an answer the big sites won’t adopt until they know most of their audience has the IDs, and most of the audience won’t get the IDs until they’re pushed into it. Sigh…

hmmmm, Maybe we ought to lobby someone like Amazon to give / nag each of their customers to get an openID?

At the moment, if bloggers want to encourage comments, is their best line of defense against spam is to have a good spam engine and to moderate a reader’s first comment?

By the way, is the preferred form captcha (all lower case) or CAPTCHA (all upper case).

The idea is that people would see a regular form and no captchas at all. The spam bots would see that same form plus an extra field that people don’t see. If that field comes back filled in, it means a spam bot filled it in.

While a good idea, the nature of the spam war is that the bot designers learn these tricks very quickly and find ways to overcome them.

Bottom line, and it’s a shame, is that the technique is not useful enough to work for large, high-traffic sites. Sure, it appears to work well for the geeky web designer (self-referential) who uses it on his own lightly traveled blog. But it won’t work for Google or Yahoo or other large sites. The spammers can too easily defeat it.

Unfortunately, I think we’re stuck with obnoxious captchas for a long time. You see, the person who comes up with a very effective replacement for the captcha, a very easy to use and highly accurate Turing Test, could be instantly wealthy. And with the way people scheme to make money, someone should have come up with that very lucrative answer by now. They haven’t.

As always, all the best to Glenda. Keep up the great work!

Negative CAPTCHAS might stop this generation of spambots, but spammers will just redesign a better spambot.

To defeat spam, we need some time of confirmation system, either third party (OpenID) or personal (email confirmation or registration).