Was at a site today that had a captcha scheme that was nearly impossible for even a human to decipher. Then an article pops up in my feeds about captchas and pwntcha…
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Captcha...Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
Pwntcha...Pretend We’re Not a Turing Computer but a Human Antagonist
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Pwntcha is for automatically deciphering captchas and spamming.

Didn’t realize all the various systems there are. Here’s an article about Pwntcha and the, pros/cons/weaknesses of each of the Captcha systems. Looks like EE uses the Hoke captcha system.

I have never had a comment spam problem since switching to EE—and I haven’t been using CAPTCHAs in quite a while. Instead I’ve removed the Submit button from the initial comment form, forcing a second click to post. In theory, that should be even easier to beat than deciphering the CAPTCHA…

Even when I was still using MT, though, the best tool I wanted but couldn’t use was a script to expire old comment threads automatically. I couldn’t use PHP on the host I was using at that time and the script wouldn’t work otherwise. And even with EE it’s almost guaranted that a trackback spammer will hit an old post rather than any new ones.

Which reminds me—whatever became of the FR to close trackbacking on old posts…?

Very interesting page PXLated thanks for the link.  I’m wondering where the Hoke method came from.  It would appear that the best ones all distort the letters in some way.

Jamie