Rewinding a bit on the new comment registration required policy, have decided to experiment with MT-Keystrokes, a Movable Type plugin that inserts JavaScript into pages which looks for actual keystroke input into form fields. All the captcha goodness, without the accessibility problems raised by image captchas.
So… the comment form is back in plain view for now. Will run this way for a while; if successful, could end up sticking with it and backing off on the registration policy for customers. Will have to wait and see whether spambots end up at the doorstep.
Thanks Nick
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Sounds like a good (and interesting) compromise, Scot! Hope this works out for ya (and your server!).
Hey Scot,
This sounds like a good thing to implement. Not sure though if it’s MT 2.x compatible ? Couldn’t find any info on that (but I only glanced quickly)…
After some calm, I’m getting a lot of (new) spam again lately.
So I dreamt (really!) about a very easy solution to end all comment spam… Why don’t we ask our commenters to include certain keywords in their comments ? Something like: start every comment with “Hey Guy”… And then capture that with a plugin and some javascript or something… To add some smoothness, it should be easy to remove that particular key phrase when the comment is rendered to the database (to avoid some silliness in all comments)…
Most likely I’m overlooking something here, and I’m not smart enough to know, so what do you think of this idea ?
Hey Guy, I’d say upgrade to MT3 and try Keystrokes! It seems to be working nicely so far, I’m starting to wonder why it isn’t built into MT. Perhaps it will be someday.
Thinking about it, since this is JavaScript and is all about the form, not interaction with the server, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work with MT2, though the implementation instructions might be a bit different if the form fields have changed.
Meanwhile, your idea sounds good too, but is more complicated than Keystrokes, which is actually very simple in concept and design.
Hi Scot, so I made the upgrade to 3.15 (smooth), and installed KeyStrokes… Perhaps I did do something wrong, because now I can’t comment (for testing purposes) anymore after I’ve already commented. I get this error message saying that you can’t comment shortly after one another, but I waited like 30 minutes to post another comment, and it still rejects my 2nd comment… ? Hmmm…
Guy, wow — take a look in your mt.cfg and see if you have a throttle value set there. Even if you do though, it should only be 30 seconds or so… Do they have a support forum at the Keystrokes site? I didn’t do anything special when I set it up here — just used the destructions on the site…