After I switched to reCAPTCHA the other day, it took all of half an hour before I saw my first bit of trackback spam. reCAPTCHA can’t do anything about trackbacks, unfortunately, so I withheld judgment.

The trackback spam was shortly followed by a bunch of comment moderation emails from WordPress. It seemed there were dozens of humans out there carefully pasting spam into my comments form and solving the CAPTCHAs. What a sad thought. So I turned Spam Karma 2 back on. After some help, I understood that reCAPTCHA saves spam that does not pass the CAPTCHA for your perusal. (Does anyone actually go back and peruse spam?) Quoth the FAQ:

reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam, so if you get moderation emails when spam comments are sent, you will get moderation emails for all spam comments with reCAPTCHA. We highly recommend turning off moderation emails with reCAPTCHA.

I read this before installing the plugin, but found it confusing. “reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam”? Which comments? All of them? Why would it do that? So, naturally, I ignored the warning.

It turns out that I wasn’t the only one confused. The ambiguity could have been eliminated by adding one word to that sentence. So an exercise in fighting spam becomes a lesson in copywriting.

I still love the reCAPTCHA concept, but I have to stick with Spam Karma for now — unless someone knows a solution for catching only trackback spam.

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