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Re:You probably don’t need ReCAPTCHA by luckylion on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @12:37AM (#20161811)
> Even with bypass services, cheap is not the same as free, especially at the scale spam runs at.

Spam doesn't scale on a small site. Say you can absolutely fill a small site with spam comments to the point that 99% of comments are spam. Very few people visit the site (it's small after all). Fewer still read the comments. Virtually none of those will click on the (usually obvious) spam links. And still fewer will buy, making you money. If you spend 2 hours customizing your spam script to circumvent anti-spam measures on a small site, you might as well flip burgers at McDonald's, you'll make significantly more money.

Spam works at scale only when you're not customizing. I'm involved with quite a few small to medium and a few larger sites (the largest getting around 4m PI/month) and though we use WP we get virtually no spam because of trivial deviations. We get an immense amount of attempts though. The little we do get is obviously manual spam: in the correct language, with content targeted to the individual page/post content (beyond "very interesting article, I wrote about the same" one-size-fits-all).

Re:You probably don’t need ReCAPTCHA by nitrogen on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @12:52AM (#20161869)
The spam I see is trying to add little bits of pagerank all over the place.
Re:You probably don’t need ReCAPTCHA by dorgo on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @01:50AM (#20162082)
What about the wikipedia solution for this: rel="nofollow" ?
Re:You probably don’t need ReCAPTCHA by JoshTriplett on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @03:10AM (#20162415)
The spammers don't care; they spam anyway.
Re:You probably don’t need ReCAPTCHA by luckylion on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @03:46AM (#20162561)
That also scales only if you don't customize. A low-value backlink that will usually be removed in the near future isn't worth an hour or two of a developer's time.