Are You a Human

Why WPMU DEV and EduBlogs Chose Are You a Human

Joe Foley is a writer at WPMU.org, a WordPress news and information site, and its sister site WPMU DEV, a site offering over 300 WordPress plugins and themes. Recently WPMU DEV integrated Are You a Human’s PlayThru captcha game into one of their most important plugins. Joe is here to tell us why.

At WMPU DEV, we know spam.

As the team behind Edublogs.org, the second largest WordPress Multiuser site on the web (second only to wordpress.com), trust me when I tell you that we know spam.

As you might imagine, it’s a constant fight to keep up on the latest and greatest tactics that spammers use. And so the in-house spam tools that we develop (and also release for public consumption on WPMU DEV), are constantly being improved and upgraded.

Because of our somewhat unique situation, the equation is pretty simple really – if our spam tools don’t work, then it’s not just our customers who suffer, WE SUFFER. In fact, we no doubt suffer more than most.

And so when we add a weapon to our anti-spam arsenal, you can be sure that it works. And not only that, you can be sure it works on a massive scale.

Choosing Are You a Human for Anti-Splog

Recently we added Are You a Human’s PlayThru Captcha  as an option on our popular Anti-Splog plugin.

WPMU DEV developers decided on PlayThru for a number of reasons:

• We wanted to offer our users an alternative to traditional captcha solutions – which can either be easily gamed or which end up being nearly impossible for humans to decipher.
• We liked the “human” element of it, the playfulness of it. No one likes filling out captchas. But if you can turn it into a little game, then at least some of that tedium is taken away.
• It’s easy to use on mobile devices.
• It was easy to integrate.
• And, well, it works.

Thanks, Guys

And so what is this blog post all about? Well, it’s just short note of thanks to the team at Are You a Human.

Thanks for giving us more options in our never-ending battle against spammers.

Thanks for helping our users and our users’ users feel a little less bored and annoyed when signing up for a site.

Thanks for making a tool that easily integrates into our own tools.

And thanks for making something that we can count on, something that will scale on the level that we need it to scale on.

As mentioned before, we can’t afford tools that don’t work. This is why we use Are You a Human.