So n8blog got its first round of comment spam last night. I figured this would
come up at some point, but I had hoped that the relative obscurity of PyBlosxom
and my site might keep the bogeyman at bay. But there it was. About 20 people
left comments, and golly, they all just happened to be enthusiastic supporters
of various casinos in France and Italy!

As an utterly brain-dead way of preventing this sort of thing from happening
again I've implemented a simple
Turing test
on the comment entry form. For
those of you who aren't familiar with the concept, a Turing test is is a
challenge posed to AI researchers. A person is seated at a terminal,
communicating with two entities. One is another human,
the other is an AI. The person is allowed to ask any question of either
entity, and must try to correctly identify the AI. The AI has passed the
Turing test if it is able to fool the person about 50% of the time.

My Turing test, of course, is not a real Turing test. You don't need to enter into a lengthy conversation to prove your humanity. Also, the tester is not a human, but a Python script. And the test is, shall we say, on the simple side?

By the way, a type of real Turing test was conducted recently, but the results haven't been posted yet.