2] I noticed that you have been getting comment spammed of late. Have you considered using a Human Verifier? The PHP Nuke site that I host uses one which prevents non-humans entities from comment spamming.

Moreover, captchas have proved to be ineffective against spamming too! Spammers are an ingenious lot, you know!

Just out of curiosity - has anybody who reads this blog ever bought anything from a spam message? I am referring to genuine spam - not malicious phishing or Nigerian scams - but the sort that legitamate (well almost) companies send out hoping you’ll buy their products? Basically advertizing from small business’ trying to take on the P&Gs with their multi-million $ advertizing budget.

As far as spammers and captchas are concerned, as I said, spammers are an ingenious lot. They no longer need to recruit humans to create hundreds of yahoo or hotmail accounts. What they do is to set up a website that offers some irresistible offer, say free porn. But they require people to register themselves for that offer. So a registration form is presented to the person who’s tempted by their offer. In the background the spammer’s website starts the registration process for a webmail account. So this mail registration page presents the spamming website with a captcha. The spamming website in turn shows this captcha to the person who’s trying to register on their site (for porn). This person deciphers the captcha word or number and this is in turn used by the spamming website to complete the registration process for the webmail account. ;-)

No. We’re not that stupid. Besides, I rarely get to see any spam these days because my three levels of spam filtering get rid of 99% of the spam.

I am planning to implement a captcha eventually, but right now, there isn’t much comment spam on this site thanks to both MT-Blacklist as well as some minor code hacks I put in. CK, what gives you the impression that comment spam is really hitting this site?