I like(d) the idea behind reCAPTCHA, blocking spam while helping scanning books is cool, and let’s be honest, reCAPCHA images are more readable to the human eye than the random deformed alphanumeric combinations the usual antispam codes produce.
Anyway, even if I have Akismet plugin installed, being the comments captcha’ed I expected almost no spam at all, not certainly from bots, yet it’s been a constant for me; lately, a huge wave of spam messages, almost identical, hitted the website; this also happened on the punbb forum of my professional website, where reCAPTCHA plugin was in action, and you understand that finding a spam post containing plenty of links with obscene thumbnails attached is not good for my image.
What’s the reason behind all this? Possibly reCAPTCHA pollution by special kind of keyword spamming to make certain known words always check positive, or advanced OCR techniques, or your average next door guy payed some millicent each captcha he decyphers. I don’t really care, what I know is that spam is passing through.
So I decided to drop reCAPTCHA altogether and switch to good old onsite captcha generation, let’s see what happens, there is now SI Captcha plugin installed (suppose SI stands for SecureImage, I recognize the pattern).
