Switching over to Akismet spam protection on my blog. Lemme explain. CAPTCHA – those small image boxes with weird random characters are a very nice idea, but a little low on accessibility. This is one thing Blogger had – accessibility for the visually impaired using audio CAPTCHA; but that doesn’t seem to be that nice an idea on WordPress. So I thought of using this another one, called Math Comment Spam Protection. It basically gives a simple math addition question, for people to solve and show they aren’t a bot. Very effective idea. Except that there seemed to be some problem with my blog. You see, all the admin folk and authors of this blog, when signed in, could post comments without a problem – so we never detected it. I came to know this later, thanks to Uma and Naman, that when others tried to enter any comments it would show them the 404 error page.
My bad, that I didn’t test it for such a situation. Anyway, I’ve now switched to WordPress’ own Akismet system – which uses statistical analysis to determine whether a comment is spam or not, without the need for the user to solve any challenges. I was initially against using this, because on every goddamn WordPress blog with Akismet activated that I blog on, it MY comments as spam. It probably won’t block me on my blog when I’m the admin myself; but I didn’t want it to happen to anyone else either. The problem is that Akismet doesn’t tell the user the comment has been blocked as spam if it is, it simply refreshes the page.
Do tell me if there are problems with this. Of course, WordPress 2.5 has come out, but I’ll probably be upgrading after the AIEEE – because I don’t want to spend time now trying to sort out any plugin conflicts.