A new spam fighting plugin has emerged – WordVerify makes the user enter a ‘code word’ before a comment is accepted: in the author’s own words:
WordVerify provides a simpler alternative to this method, by just requiring the entry of a single word. This provides a healthy compromise for smaller blogs that don’t necessarily need the security of a dynamic image. The chances of any comment spammer bothering to screen-scrape my blog just to comment-spam it, much less OCR an image, are pretty low. For smaller blogs, the simple addition of a codeword is probably more than enough.
I remember seeing this on at least one site before, but this is the first Wordpress plugin I’m aware of that implements it. There are a couple of other things that make it different from a captcha:
- Advantage: It’s legal in the UK. Normal captchas (except the likes of the Spam Karma 2 which offer an accessible alternative such as e-mail verification) could potentially fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995
- Disadvantage: The phrase is the same every time. Sure, you can change the explanatory phrase, and you can change the codeword itself, but one of the main strengths of captchas is their randomness, and this doesn’t really have any randomness at all.
Thanks for the link.. One thing I have considered adding is making the configuration allow the addition of an arbitrary number of phrases and codewords and having it just randomize the display of both, which would help the static-ness.