Today, MT-Keystrokes joins the recently-reactivated MT Blacklist in my fight against comment-spam.
My MT-Blacklist interface says it's blocked 120 comment-spams since I reinstalled it yesterday, but my Movable Type comments list shows that 89 others were allowed through Blacklist's defenses. About 42.6% failure rate. I'd actually say that's pretty good, but we're trying for 100% here so we need to continue increasing our spam defenses.
Comment-spammers typically don't actually post their comments in the traditional way. They're automated, bypassing the actual comment form and submitting info directly to the post-accepting scripts.
Enter MT-Keystrokes. This Movable Type plugin attempts to "reduce comment spam without affecting the reader's experience [by making sure] that every comment has some level of human input." Keystrokes only allows comment submissions when it detects that typing has actually occured in the comment form itself. The presumption here being that such form usage isn't automated and it's probably a real person posting that comment.
I like the idea of MT-Keystrokes a lot. To me, it feels a lot like those "type in the characters you see in the image next to this form" security alternatives, except more graceful and intrusive. MT-Keystrokes is in effect for this site as of now.
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