12.2. Basic Spam Prevention

Unfortunately, any web form is a potential target for spammers, both human and automated. If left unchecked, spammers can ruin a blog by flooding the comments with irrelevant links and other garbage. The spam buries legitimate comments and makes it difficult to find anything meaningful in the comment section, which can cause your users to give up on leaving or reading comments altogether.

To address this problem, you'll need to take some anti-spam measures on your comment form. There are myriad options available for spam prevention, ranging from user-dependent systems such as CAPTCHA[] (the squiggly letters and numbers you've no doubt seen on some web forms), to server-side technologies such as Akismet[] (which identifies ...

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