I have to admit that I really dislike CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA and all other variations of spam prevention that want you to prove that you are human by making you try to decipher some picture and then typing in the letters and numbers that you see.

You will find this most often when you are signing up for forums and blogs, or posting a comment on a website.  Sometimes I get it right on the first attempt, but there are many times that it will take me two or three tries before I figure out what it is I am actually seeing!

So a while back, I thought to myself “Self, there has to be a better way to prevent spam!“. And there is! It’s called Bad Behavior, the Web’s premier link spam killer (and it’s FREE).

From the author’s website:

Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it.

Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.

Bad Behavior works on, or can be adapted to, virtually any PHP-based Web software package. Bad Behavior is available natively for WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, and LifeType, and people have successfully made it work with Movable Type, phpBB, and many other packages.

In a nutshell, Bad Behavior prevents spam robots from even accessing your site in the first place. It’s available as a plugin for WordPress and for several other popular programs, and also comes as a PHP script which can be easily integrated into an existing website or program.

Now if I can just get all those forums, blogs and comment forms to use Bad Behavior instead of CAPTCHA, then my life would be a whole lot easier!

The WordPress plugin is available here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bad-behavior/

The Bad Behavior website is here: http://bad-behavior.ioerror.us/