Adscaptcha - stop spam & make money. Dept "wish I had thought of that" ideas.

There's a new ad-network in town, and it's called Adscaptcha. Recognising that site owners have grown increasingly tired of spam, and more than ever are using captcha and third-party tools to cull the onslaught Adscaptcha has created a spam-check that displays ads, and forces the would-be spammer to type the latest deal being advertised through them. How very clever.

I decided to try it out, to see how it works. As you know we've closed for anonymous comments years ago, not because ad-sites attract the worst of mean comments from advertising professionals, but because spammers love adland. There's commercials for Viagra here, there are Lotto keywords, every shoe brand you can think of, and every keyword you can think of. Whenever I open for anonymous comments, I spend hours deleting spam, no matter if I try different captchas, moderation, or a combo of both.

I set up Adscaptcha yesterday, and found we've received anon comments around 30 minutes after it was in place. It was a valid comment, neat! It wasn't until the fifth anonymous comment that a link-spammer appeared. Still, that's not so bad, as now I'm (sorta) getting paid for deleting the spammy comments. Well, it's not a fortune, clearly, but not a bad idea. I predict this will take off.