Reinstalling reCAPTCHA

In the last post I wrote about finally cutting off the comments feature due to an abundance of spam.

For about two days, this was successful...

And then, things simply switched to the primary/contact form. At first I figured it was a bit of a fluke as a short influx of additional posts. Over the course of the following week, however, things quickly spiraled out of control. Some days I was receiving upwards of 80 spam posts per day. Predominantly about various porn interests, of course. The "your car's extended warranty" material of Internet spam.

When I built out the new contact form, I'd deliberately left out the reCAPTCHA service. I've been using it for years, including on the comment form, but had disabled it about nine months ago due to the fact it seemed less effective and was letting more bits through. Given the other anti-spam mechanisms I have enabled, not enabling reCAPTCHA for the contact form had been working.

It was time to revisit that choice. And so with [almost] the flick of a switch the reCAPTCHA challenge was added/enabled. Let's see what this does...

The change was nearly 100% effective. I went from ~80 posts per day down to one or two.

Now, I can't speak to exactly what combination (or specifically which mechanism) is having the most impact, but what I can say is that this particular combination of enabled mechanisms is working best for me...right now. So I'll leave it be for the time being and revisit again in the future as necessary.

So once again, the whole intent of this post is simply to encourage the reevaluation of past choices to Make Things Better. You never know what impact the thing that didn't work yesterday might have today (or in the future)!