Promote pet adoption and protect your blog from SPAM at the same time
May 16, 2007 – 8:33 am
Dave von Fintel, a friend of mine that works at Rockhurst University, sent me a link to a Microsoft & Petfinder.com project called Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access). I guess the link was in a Chronicle of Higher Ed story. The project uses cat & dog pictures to test whether or not the comment form is being completed by a bot or a human.
For anyone that has a blog (or email account, for that matter), you are well aware of the spam that runs a muck on the internet. According to Wikipedia, around 85% of email is spam.
For blogs, a way to limit spam posts on your site is to require the user to take an action that can’t be easily completed by a bot, but is pretty easy for a human to do. This process is called CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) or HIP (Human Interactive Proof).
Some blogs, such as stampkit, utilize a basic picture that can by translated very easily. Other sites, like myspace, use images that are nearly impossible (and annoying) to read and translate. On my site, I utilize the Wordpress software that identifies posts as spam.
In the last 6 months, Akismet, the tool that Wordpress uses as an anti-spam tool, has caught 1,674 attempted spam posts.
My personal yahoo account receives around 50 spam.
Spam isn’t going away any time soon, so if you have a blog and are passionate about animals and pet adoption, check out the Asirra project.
One Response to “Promote pet adoption and protect your blog from SPAM at the same time”
Thanks for the good press, Dustin. I use a really simple plugin on Stampkit that’s available to WordPress users:
It creates an anti-spam jpg using random words of your choice and it does not require visitors to have cookies enabled.
I was able to create my own list of words and then totally customized the appearance of the JPEGs that would be generated.
My list includes words like gravy, butter, beard and goat. Have fun connecting those dots.
By Paul Corrigan on May 16, 2007