CAPTCHA!

As recommended by a friend I have started using HN_CAPTCHA to validate humans.

The adventure began when I noticed that the amount of money I had in my account was rapidly dwindling away to nothing. Now my hosting provider is amazingly cheap so I initially had no explanation as to what was causing the approximately $5-$10 a month cost. Looking a bit closer it turned out planetjoel.com was doing 1gb a day, mostly because my most most popular article was now 1MB in size in just text. Spammers had spammed the comments to the point that there was now 6000 comments about 5999 of which were spam.

So I’ve put in place a CAPTCHA which is one of those crazy images that are hard for computers to read but relatively easy for humans. This should stop the spam almost entirely. Spammers are the scum of the universe.