Comment Verification Followup

Wow, it is great to create something that people find useful! My article on WordPress Comment Verification has generated lots of trackbacks and comments, all informative and none of them spam!

A reader by the name of Willie asked “Just wondering, how hard would it be to generate one of those graphics with a word that must be typed in instead of your name?”

Willie, those graphics are called Captchas, and you can read more at the Captcha Project Site and in Wikipedia entry.

It would not be hard to generate these images using PHP and Thomas Boutell’s GD Library. My only concern is that this library is not configured in to PHP by default, and this may cause some installation problems. Getting GD to properly find and use system fonts can also be tricky.

The real issue when you create something cool, free, and simple like this is the ongoing support. Perhaps I’ll do something that is cool enough that the WordPress guys will include it in the default distribution.