If you remember we moved away from CAPTCHAs in December and replaced them with two techniques discussed in this post: An alternative to irritating CAPTCHAs.

Well in the last week or so those techniques have started to come up short. Now I am not 100% sure whether it is due to the fact that the bots have gotten smarter or whether it's due to manual spam submissions, but more and more spam comments seem to be getting through. It's not like the methods we applied are not working at all, they still block more than 95% of our spam attacks, but its that last 5% of spam comments that come through that really drive me up the wall.

It seems like I might have lost a round in my ongoing fight with the spambots, but the war is not over yet!
Enter my new secret weapon (well not so secret actually): Spam checking via distributed approaches.

Let me explain:
Basically there are services out there (like Akismet and LinkSleeve) that allow you to check the posted comments via their spam verification routines to determine whether or not they are spam.
I wont go into the details of how they do it, but basically you take the information that gets submitted and send it off to the service, they check the content and send you back a result saying whether they think it is spam or not.

I've known about Akismet for a while now and we have tried it out on our trackbacks with great success.
I wanted to give LinkSleeve a try, but in testing I couldn't get it to tag obvious spam comments as spam so I decided that we would stick to the trusted Akismet.

So from now on all trackbacks as well as comments will be verified by Akismet on GottaQuirk.

I'll be posting on some stats in the next couple of weeks regarding the success of this initiative, so keep an eye out.