Mon, 26 Mar 2007

Mar 26, 2007, 12:40 [home/perl_scripts]
I Wrote a Captcha Script

The amount of spam hitting the various sites I design lately has been getting crazy. Some of my clients are getting dozens of ringtones, porn, and scam links posted to their comments boxes and guestbooks.

So this morning I wrote a Captcha-style script, which I’ve called Cotcha. (Yeah, I know, really original — an acronym for Coded Objective to Tell Computers and Humans Apart).

What makes this script so cool is that it can be integrated into any pre-existing form and/or perl script to add an extra element of spam protection.

Right now the Cotcha code is only plain text— the next step of this script’s development is to create an image of the “Cotcha” code using ImageMagick. Since most web servers don’t come with this program preinstalled, I’m going to leave it off until it’s absolutely critical or someone makes a special request for the code to be imagefied.

So if you’re having trouble with comment spam, feel free to get this script. I’ll be putting it up on Intelliscript.net soon. Watch for updates.

~Jason