thanx -- i did not know the term.  the website is ancient, but so is
my google groups login hehe, and that is the *best* way to cut down
spam!

this looks promising:
http://simplecaptcha.sourceforge.net/

cheers!

On Feb 16, 11:18 am, "Chris Uppal" <chris.up...@metagnostic.REMOVE-
THIS.org> wrote:

On Feb 16, 7:18 pm, "Chris Uppal" <chris.up...@metagnostic.REMOVE-
THIS.org> wrote:

The problem with captcha is that it shifts the burden of spam from the
webmaster onto the visitor. As a visitor it can be very annoying
trying to post a quick comment to a blog and having to do silly
puzzles or work out what warped obscure letters are...

A better solution would be to write your form into the page using
JavaScript (replacing the capture form possibly?) ... that way you
stop a large amount of spam because most harvesters just scan the html
for certain form tags - i.e. no parsing of JavaScript. If you really
wanted to keep out the spambots, add an onclick event to a 'button'
image to display the form instead. That way you also avoid spambots
that know how to parse JavaScript but might not know how to click an
image.

As a last resort, if the user has JavaScript turned off then the
captcha stuff is displayed (because the JavaScript would replace the
captcha form if it was enabled)...

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Richard