Peter Ammon, better known on-line as ridiculous_fish, had a problem:
Well, they found me. I knew it was only a matter of time. It happens to every blog. Comment spam, and a lot of it. But nobody told me it would be like this! I got about 200 messages an hour.
Now, Peter Ammon is a clever guy. Buzz Andersen, a fellow Mac OS X programmer and a pretty clever guy himself, calls Peter
when he introduces him to others.
So, when Peter writes:
I mean, the attention is flattering, but still, my goodness! Let's see what we can do about that.
You can be confident he'll do more than produce Yet Another CAPTCHA™ tool.
And he did.
Peter's anti-spam challenge system could be called a 'MAPTCHA' (Mathematical CAPTCHA), but most MAPTCHA's are simplistic, and dull. Also, they require you do a tiny bit of simple arithmetic: enough to fool comment spam engines but not enough to make you feel clever (or stupid).
Peter's MAPTCHA is not simplistic, definitely not dull (although you do have to think maths is, in and of itself, interesting to appreciate it), and does something really cool even though you don't have to do any actual mathematics.
I'm not going to spoil the surprise: head on over and take a look yourself.