Enabling spam protection for blog comments
I just finished adding spam protection to the commenting system used on this blog. By adding a CAPTCHA field to the comment form, bots can no longer automatically add spam comments.
Enabling this feature turned out to be fairly simple. Just install sr_freecap, which is an extension for TYPO3 that can generate the CAPTCHA fields. The guestbook extension (ve_guestbook) which is used for comments has support sr_freecap by default, so the only thing you need to do is update the guestbook template used by TIMTAB (default is: EXT:timtab\res\kubrick\kubrick_ve_guestbook.tmpl).
Update the template by adding the following lines:
<!--###CAPTCHA_INSERT### this subpart is removed if CAPTCHA is not enabled! -->
<p>
<input type="text" name="tx_veguestbook_pi1[captcha_response]" title="###SR_FREECAP_NOTICE###" value="" />
<label for="email">
<small>
###SR_FREECAP_NOTICE### ###SR_FREECAP_CANT_READ###
</small>
</label>
<br />
<br />
###SR_FREECAP_IMAGE###
</p>
<!--###CAPTCHA_INSERT###-->
That's it! Your blog is now protected from comment spam.
Saturday, 03-03-07 12:54
This is a test.
Saturday, 03-03-07 14:08
Another test
Saturday, 10-03-07 23:09
disturbed mp3 download down with sickness ringtones
Tuesday, 08-05-07 13:55
Well it looks like at least one spammer (the ringtone one above) managed to get through it.. :-(
Wednesday, 09-05-07 20:55
Yeah, but it's a bit strange that it is just one message and only in this post which makes me think that maybe it was just someone messing around.
Saturday, 11-08-07 15:44
Just a little update, I upgraded ve_guestbook (which is used for blog comments) to 2.0, this caused captcha not to work anymore and I received quite some spam (which is deleted now) so it is working even if it does not catch everything.
To fix the captcha I didn't really have time to look through the code thoroughly so I just did a compare between the old and new class.tx_veguestbook_pi1.php and manually replaced the new captcha parts with the old ones.
Monday, 17-12-18 22:35
Enabling spam protection for blog comments