CAPTCHA based plugin installed today, courtesy of MT wizard (and employee?) Jay Allen.
After deleting another 374 spam comments today (about 25% of which made it through the MT 3.34 spam filter), I decided I had to raise the ante against the spam-bots. The Comment Challenge plugin was easy to install and configure - the main downfall I see is that the plugin is built to issue only one response at a time, and every time you change the response phrase, you have to rebuild your entire MT blog. 3400 or so individual pages, plus daily archives, monthly archives, category archives: takes a little while for my little server to complete. I don't really like the CAPTCHA used by Blogger - I can't always tell what the letters are. Simple text is better, IMNSHO.
I notice a spam comment since installation already filled in the 'response' field, albeit incorrectly; more variation would extend the difficulty for spam-rats to automate the process.
Version 1.1 will probably add the multiple question capability, among other tweaks. I'm looking forward to its release.
I also noticed one of the first comments that was falsely junked because of not entering the challenge word. I noticed she tried a couple times without success. Would be nice to be able to tweak the scoring, like other MT plugins, but perhaps one could get too clever and frack up the whole system.
Of course, while installing and tweaking my templates, I goofed up something, and may have destroyed the right column again for Windows users. Damn div tags, damn Internet Exploder! Looks fine in Safari, Firefox, Camino, but my sis reported problems. My Intel XP virtual machine is malfunctioning already, so can't check for myself.
One should not make coding decisions late at night while drinking Vitiano Falesco 2004. Other wines might be ok, but not that one. Doh!
(previous worship of Jay Allen)
