My CAPTCHA Add-on for Community Server 2.1 is now available in my Files area Community Server Add-Ons Folder.
What can I say, I used CAPTCHA for almost two years now and have never had to think about Spam. CAPTCHA puts the burden on my friends who are good enough to add comments on this site (and your friends who add comments to your site), but this CAPTCHA displays a clearly visible 3-digit code and is a small request to make for the benefit of being completely Spam-free.
There have been significant improvements made in Spam prevention, no question, and I can begin to accept the idea that my embrace of CAPTCHA may be coming to an end. (Wow, that was quite a collective gasp!) Releasing a CAPTCHA Add-On also makes me feel like I'm dissing one of the best developers and greatest guys that I know, Jose Lema, by not using the rock solid Spam Blocker he designed for Community Server. There's no question the CS Spam Blocker works and with additions like those added just today, in fact, with Askimet and 3rd party integration (thanks primarily to the work of Thomas Freudenberg), you can't find better Spam Prevention. But darn it, I'm an oldster who can't even spell "threashold" let alone configure for it, and I never could understand the difference between a "bad word" and a "forbidden word." Bad words have four letters in them and forbidden words start with an "F" as far as I know. On the other hand, I do understand asking for 3 numbers to make Spam a non-issue.
I just searched my blog and found the description of my first CAPTCHA mod back in October, 2004. That was for dotText, and seems like such a long time ago. CAPTCHA mods for CS 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 followed, and now CAPTCHA for CS 2.1. You could say I'm like Sam Weber in The Big Chill, throwing a spaghetti noodle against the wall in Harold and Sarah Cooper's kitchen to test whether its done or not. Meg (Mary Kaye Place) says to Sam, "Do you mean after all these years that's the only thing you know how to make?" to which Sam Weber replies, "But I've improved on it!"
This tribute-to-sticky-spaghetti-noodle CAPTCHA Add-On is, incredibly, my first Drop and Pop version of CAPTCHA for Community Server. Every previous version required changing the source. Bad. This version has a drop-in \bin\DLL, a drop-in \blogs\.ASPX file, and some HTML snippets for the appropriate .ASCX files. So the bad news is that there's another Community Server CAPTCHA Mod in the world; the good news is that I'm getting better at it. heh.
Speaking of getting it better, a big thank you to The Wizard, Rick Reszler, who helped me work out the kinks in supporting the new CS 2.1 themes like Paperclip that inherit from \default View controls and for improving the installation process in general.