So I got the Wordpress MU blog system up and running YESTERDAY. And today I wake up to some spam in the form of a bot that created a “wow gold farmer” blog. It was completely random crap and went a pretty long way towards detailing my need of some form of bot protection.

I’m stunned that I got botted so soon after putting it up, more over on domains that didn’t exist until yesterday.  BUT likely due to my post of yesterday which told the bots where to go — woops.  A solution was required and fast!

I did some research and found a nice plugin that should solve the problem, and help others at the same time.  The folks over at recaptcha.net are solving this problem in a new and creative way.  Recaptcha is helping solve the problem of imperfect OCR readers and helping to digitize books by sending words that cannot be ready by the computer to the web in the form of captcha’s to be solved by humans.   This is all kinds of clever. 

Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known.  The user is then asked to read both words.  if they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one.  the system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

By adding this spam blocker, we are helping the greater community.. I like that.

The amusing thing is BlaenkDenum JUST created this reCaptcha WPMU plug-in a couple of days ago.. lucky for me!