The Path to Zen

WP GateKeeper

I am looking for a comment spam blocker to use with this WordPress installation. I looked at Spam Karma, but can’t get it running on my server. Some other people were asking about the same errors I got on the WP forum, but didn’t get any answer. Not wanting to spend time hacking into php code, I decided to look further, and found WP GateKeeper.

It took me 2 minutes to install. The way it works is to add a question to the comment posting form. The answer to the question is very obvious to a human - “what color is an orange?”, but not so much to a spambot. The question is randomly selected from a set which can be modified to your own taste. I figure one of two things would have to happen before the GateKeeper can be fooled: either a spambot that has the ability to parse natural language, or someone’s got hell of some computing power to crack the hashed question key in the form page.

Of course, I have heard of the trick to have some other site viewers (porn?) solving these questions (or images) in real-time…