On this blog in response to the comment spammers we implemented our own CAPTCHA scheme last year (woohoo I can say that now, Happy New Year!) and I’m happy to report that it has dramatically reduced mechanized spam and at the same time not reduced the number of comments. CAPTCHA doesn’t do anything about people who manually enter in spam but it seems like we don’t receive much of that. I’ve tweaked the CAPTCHA code so that it will make all text uppercase so that people entering in comments can enter lower or upper case and it will still match. This will help with those forgot to use UPPERCASE. Some features I’d like to add in 2005 include:

• Automatic save of information entered in form. This way if people misenter the code, then return to the page they won’t lose their comment text. This sucks when you misenter a code and then lose the post. I recognize this situation and want to fix this.
• Alternate form of CAPTCHA for accessibility reasons. People who are blind who have the blog read to them cannot confirm the image, so I’d like to provide an alternate method of verifying that they aren’t a bot (perhaps something sound related)
• Consider sharing CAPTCHA with third party sites. Some folks have asked me when or if I’ll share the custom CAPTCHA code I’m using here with third party sites and the answer is likely not the code itself, but instead perhaps I’ll offer a solution where people can easily add CAPTCHA to their blog programs hosted and maintained by me. I don’t know of many third party hosted CAPTCHA solutions, so this might be a road worth exploring, however there would likely need to be some business model in it since we pay for our own hosting and I’m not sure what the business model might be for something like this. There are other CAPTCHA solutions out there already (all of which are free, I believe) that folks can implement in their blog programs so I would probably be more likely to just point folks to them, but if I develop this hosted CAPTCHA idea more fully I very likely will want to share it with others, so who knows on this one.

Thank you for reading in 2003 (I know of at least one Bloglines subscriber since 2003 and a couple others in Bloglet), and to the many new subscribers in 2004, as well to (hopefully) future subscribers in 2005. I find it a bit fascinating that this blog’s rating at Hot or Not is 3.4 out of 10 with 99 votes, and that’s not very good (below average in fact), but we must be doing at least something right here or our subscriptions wouldn’t keep growing and our site traffic to the site wouldn’t increase (which it doubled over what it was in 2004). So this leaves me a bit confused about the usefulness from a business perspective of rating sites. And speaking of site traffic, I’ll be glad when the holidays are over in that respect because traffic has gone into the toilet during the last week. That indicates to me that this blog has a significant number of business people reading because they are spending time with their family, not reading blogs.

One of my goals for this blog by the end of 2005 is to grow the total subscriber list to 500+, which means we have a considerable way to go. Those of you reading this who aren’t subscribed can help out by subscribing via bloglines or bloglet (the form to the left), this way you’ll count as one of the subscribers. Maybe I’ll put up a graph to share where we are at so people can help us along in our goal. I’m going to post my 2005 predictions in my next post and it will be interesting to see at the end of 2005 how wrong I am (or right, I suppose) and I will add this to the prediction list (MakeYouGoHmm: 500+ subscribers).

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• Add an Alexa Traffic Stats graph to your website or blog