Adscaptcha - stop spam & make money. Dept "wish I had thought of that" ideas.

There's a new ad-network in town, and it's called Adscaptcha. Recognising that site owners have grown increasingly tired of spam, and more than ever are using captcha and third-party tools to cull the onslaught Adscaptcha has created a spam-check that displays ads, and forces the would-be spammer to type the latest deal being advertised through them. How very clever.

I decided to try it out, to see how it works. As you know we've closed for anonymous comments years ago, not because ad-sites attract the worst of mean comments from advertising professionals, but because spammers love adland. There's commercials for Viagra here, there are Lotto keywords, every shoe brand you can think of, and every keyword you can think of. Whenever I open for anonymous comments, I spend hours deleting spam, no matter if I try different captchas, moderation, or a combo of both.

I set up Adscaptcha yesterday, and found we've received anon comments around 30 minutes after it was in place. It was a valid comment, neat! It wasn't until the fifth anonymous comment that a link-spammer appeared. Still, that's not so bad, as now I'm (sorta) getting paid for deleting the spammy comments. Well, it's not a fortune, clearly, but not a bad idea. I predict this will take off.

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Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
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Dabitch's picture

I posted this in April 2011 and installed Adscaptca at the same time. It is now September 2012 and despite receiving hundreds of spam comments daily, adland hasn't made more than 102 dollars. Thus, we've never received a check, and there's no way to cash out the 102 made and walk away.

I will thus add my two cents to this post, which is: don't waste your time with this captcha. There are many image captchas that work better, and there are spam-filtering systems such a Mollum that will only hide the actual spam, and let stuff that doesn't look like spam through. I've had to shut this captcha off many times when it simply wasn't giving people images at all, preventing anyone from commenting. And the fact it has to take this long to try and get that first check when I do have thousands of spam comments every week, is very off.