reCAPTCHA Works Really Well
Posted in Tech
on December 12th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Just a quick note... recently I installed AWStats via Webfaction (which by the way is really awesome hosting, especially for Python) for my infiniterecursion.ca domain. One interesting observation coming from this (aside from the fact that the majority of my visitors use Firefox, and I seem to have a surprising number of visitors using Macs), is that the top page viewed on my site is the guestbook, and the top visitor is an IP registered in Russia. The second most popular hit, with over 350 hits in less than a week, is the URL to post a comment.
The obvious conclusion is that someone, probably a bot, based in Russia, is trying to spam my guestbook. My guestbook is just an ordinary page with comments turned on, and at the moment I am allowing comments from other than registered users if they can solve a reCAPTCHA-based CAPTCHA. Users seeking accounts have to pass the same test. So far, I have a strong suspicion that I'm under attack, which I could easily confirm if I want to, and this has probably been going on for quite a while, but so far my security has not been cracked and no comment spam has shown up. Knock on wood.
reCAPTCHA is not my only security measure... Django comes bundled with a few anti-spam measures which I am also employing. But even so, I have to give reCAPTCHA a big thumbs up. So far I think it it is better than anything I could roll myself or obtain from public Python libraries, and that's pretty impressive for a big, public target like reCAPTCHA.
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