The Playground

If you're getting hit with comment spam, here's a life-saving plugin from Jay Allen. Comment Challenge is an effective and accessible CAPTCHA plugin to prevent spam for Movable Type 3.2 and above.

The benefits of Comment Challenge are many:

• Cuts spam almost entirely out of your daily, weekly or even monthly routine
• Text-based CAPTCHAs don't discriminate against the visually impaired
• None of the CGI calls or processor overhead for computing image CAPTCHAs
• Installation is simple: A plugin and one single template tag!
• Challenge only displayed to unauthenticated (i.e. anonymous) commenters
• Compatible with both static and dynamic templates

Installation requires entering the template tag into the Individual entry and comment preview templates but the instructions are easy to follow and most MT users should have no problems. I've been using this plugin for a couple of weeks and have noticed a marked decrease in the amount of junk comments.

The challenge will appear like this, below the comment textarea:

Another spam protection plugin is Better Spam Protect, which upgrades the email spam protection offered by the <$MTEntryAuthorLink$>, <$MTCommentAuthorLink$>, and <$MTCommentPreviewAuthorLink$> template tags.

<$MTEmailLink name="my name" address="name@example.com"$> will display my name with the email address encoded using javascript.