4 ms·

My blog simply fills in a hidden value using javascript when you press the submit button, it has stopped 99% of all spam for me. You're right, captchas aren't

• hdkvdnvxwgj 15y ago
  ...as well as anyone using NoScript, who get to spend all that time writing a comment only for it to be thrown out because of an invisible field Your "clever" system may keep bots away, but it also annoys the absolute shit out of legitimate users. Fail.
• hdkvdnvxwgj 15y ago
  (And on a related note, this comment form is damn near unusable on Android in portrait mode. I had to make this a separate comment because the box wouldn't scroll to show what I was typing...)
• InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Captchas have 2 purposes. First, prevent simple fly-by bots from spamming sites. Case in point, blog software is dominated by a few big players (e.g. wordpress) and many blogs allow anonymous comments, without something like a captcha it's a simple matter to create a spam bot that runs through a list of site's and spams ads or what-have-you in comments. Second, captchas are designed to prevent automation entirely, including custom made automation targeted to a specific site. This sort of thing is less important for, say, blog comments since the value of a typical blog comment is extremely low. But there are lots of free accounts out there, for example, and if you use automation to set up new accounts you may be able to game certain systems to your advantage, corrupting the normal process of the market.