Captcha, Gotcha?

captcha sym­bols

Blank + five = eleven.  Six, right?  Are any of you real peo­ple get­ting flum­moxed by this?  Appar­ent­ly the SPAMers are.  This site has gone from 5 to 10 SPAM com­ments per day to less than 2 SPAM com­ments per week.  More than that, my stress lev­el over the SPAM that gets through the oth­er SPAM mea­sures (like Bad Behav­ior) has low­ered considerably.

I was some­what sur­prised that answer­ing the Captcha was required even for my own login — that seemed exces­sive, but then the ques­tions are delib­er­ate­ly easy.  I haven’t required the win­doze cal­cu­la­tor (yet).  Even the form of the ques­tions amus­es me: the grade-school for­mu­la with some num­bers writ­ten and some num­bers spelled out.  It’s all very olde skule.

I had assumed that the place­ment of SPAM com­ments on my blog was a some­what more man­u­al process than per­haps it is.  I expect that if soft­ware were solv­ing the Captcha that all the SPAM­Mers would have it, but that seems not to be the case, either.  I’ve always been of two minds on this.  On the one hand, the SPAM always seems to be at least par­tial­ly cus­tomized and vague­ly top­i­cal (although that, too, could be an illu­sion) — I attribute this to the the­o­ry that “peo­ple” paid astro­nom­i­cal­ly low wages are involved.  On the oth­er hand, being sub­tly dif­fer­ent near­ly stop­ping the flow leads this to be a soft­ware and a soft­ware con­fig­u­ra­tion problem.

I sup­pose my blog does­n’t need to be the smartest blog out there — just one bit smarter than the average.