In the never-ending battle against spam, WordPress plugin developers are constantly being challenged to create solutions that will block spam but still make it easy for genuine human users to comment and participate. A new tool is available for WordPress sites that provides a fun and intuitive captcha that is much simpler than requiring users to answer inane questions or decipher barely legible letters. Slide2Comment is my new favorite plugin and I haven’t seen it in use on very many sites yet. This anti-spam captcha utlizes an iPhone-like slider to prevent spam bots from accessing your comment form. Once the user slides the arrow, the comment form appears and the slider disappears. The plugin is based on a jQuery technique which you can read more about at aboone.com.
Long Hoang developed this plugin and has already added many more features than the first version. The good news for our readers is that it works on WordPress, WPMU, and BuddyPress sites. Download the plugin from the WordPress repository, activate it, and then navigate to Settings >> Slide2Comment. If you use it with WPMU, make sure to activate it site-wide to have it work on all of your blogs. There you can edit the CSS and change the appearance of the slider to match your theme. You may also select the option to have the slider work without having to click on it.
If there were one more feature I’d request of the developer, it would be the ability to restrict new blog registration by using the slider as well. Perhaps enough positive responses from users might convince him? :) Otherwise, maybe we’ll provide a tutorial on it, if anyone is interested. Cast your votes below. ;)
When I saw this article’s title pop up in my twitter feed I thought, “OK, describing anti-spam measures as “sexy” has got to be disingenuous… but I suppose I see what you mean. I still think I’d go with “cutest” over “sexiest”, but now we’re just talking personal preference. Thanks for the article! I’ll have to find a project to give this a try!
How accessible is this solution? It seems that it wouldn’t work with screen readers, non touch screen mobile phones, and other more limited devices.
Any thoughts?
Nathan – I think the next version will make it more accessible, as the developer has plans to add a Captcha for noJS-Users.
This would be great with buddypress signups as well
I must say that comment spam isn’t too much of a problem for me. Usually Akismet does a very good job.
The big problem is registration spam. As soon as I open registration for all readers I get a mass of registration spam that I haven’t been able to control no matter what tools I have used (Captcha, Hashcash and many more).
Therefore it would be very interesting to be able to try out the slider on registrations. That would be the only reason Ipersonally would need it.
Cheers
Dave
Way Cool plugin.
I think it’s especially applicable as many Captcha’s have gotten out of control to a point where as a human I can’t tell what the letters are. Also, I would go so far as to say it would attract people who are on the fence about commenting just because it’s intriguing. Plus, Captchas are ugly.
Hey! Great to see you are making use of my proof of concept! Thanks for the link, but can you please correct the domain name in the link text, it is aboone.com not arboone.com (the link is correct). Keep up the good work!
Sure no problem. I’ve got that updated now.
I just want to comment to test it.
Me to
testing the slider
RT @timpritlove: I just want to comment to test it.
It works pretty much like this: http://www.aboone.com/javascript-iphone-lock-slider-with-jquery except added to the comment form.
RT @Felickzs @timpritlove: I Just want to comment to test it.
A little test :)
We used similar approach here with slider CAPTCHA: http://www.thebcard.com/kk12 . Feedback is much appreciated.