CAPTCHA not working/Best anti-spam measures

I cannot for the life of me get CAPTCHA to verify a string. I have a list of words, I type them in correctly and I get an error message saying the string I entered does not match the value in the image. Right now this is happening with the JOT and eForm snippet but it seems to also be taking place with WebloginPE registration, sometimes.

Has anyone else had this problem?

While i’m on the topic;

I’m curious; what is the most popular way of dealing with spam and implementing anti-spam techniques? I read a post using a blank form field that is required for eForm so that if all the fields are filled out it won’t go through. That seemed pretty novel but I’m new at this stuff and would appreciate any suggestions or best practice techniques.

Have a great weekend everyone!

If you see the string but your entry is not correct, it might indicate some kind of $_SESSION problem, since that’s where the correct string value is stored.

As for techniques, here are some of the ones available as options in the SPForm snippet:

Regular Captcha (now broken by most bots)
Math Equation Captcha
Hidden field that bots will fill in (broken by some bots)
Timer so bots that fill in the form too fast or too slow get caught
Requirement that mouse and/or keyboard be used

Another choice is Mollom, which seems to be very powerful and only shows CAPTCHA images for suspicious entries. It allows a user ID to be sent so regular users won’t have to respond to a CAPTCHA challenge. No snippets have it built in, but there is a class file that you can integrate yourself.

Another choice that some people have reported success with is Bot Scout (http://www.botscout.com/).

I’ve been using just SPForm for over a year on several sites with various options and get virtually no spam through them.