[JohnFen]

> it almost certainly wouldn't be affordable for low-traffic blogs and the like

Very few low-traffic blogs that I see use (or need) CAPTCHAs. I know that the ones I run don't.

> I don't love the compromise of paying for things with my data or by training Google's AI, but it's hard to say users aren't getting anything out of it.

I don't think they are getting much, if anything out of it -- aside from being increasingly punished for defending themselves against being spied on by Google.

[jopsen]

My personal blog has a spam filter for comments.. it's either that or captcha.. or sign in with Google/Facebook.

[johannes1234321]

Often a trivial non-standard thing like "what's the name of the author" works well enough. Especially outside the English language. Spammers won't spend the time to bother adopting their scripts for that.

If this somple thing comes from a popular WordPress plugin the equation for the spammer changes, of course.

[hombre_fatal]

There's certainly a period of time where that solution is sufficient as it stops the lowest level of drive-by <form> spam.

But it also sucks the first day you get an attacker who solves it once and then spams you thousands of times.

Modern spam tools are pretty impressive these days and minimize the targeted work the human spammer needs to do in these cases. In the early 2000s, you could set a custom question and then assume no attacker is going to manually code for your little blog.

But even in 2008 I was using spam software (out of curiosity) where you could import a massive blog list, and it would pause spamjobs with failed comment submissions, let you pencil in a value for this unknown field, and then click resume.

You could also choose other actions for that field like "prompt me each time" and sit at your computer multiplexing your labor across hundreds of blogs. And that was pretty polished ten years ago.

[jopsen]

> If this somple thing comes from a popular WordPress plugin the equation for the spammer changes, of course.

Exactly :)

[JohnFen]

My sites use a spam filter as well. I find that it's perfectly adequate.