I finally — finally — have a captcha working on my comments to block spam. Thank God. I’m not thankful because I needed it, I’m thankful because now I can stop working on it.

This has been a huge time-sucking headache that has been pissing me off for weeks. I first tried to set one up a month or two ago in the Movable Type version of this blog and didn’t have much luck. I never could get it to work right and I ended up screwing up the formatting of my search results and category templates so badly that you could hardly read the text in them. My hosting tech support wasn’t much help, Movable Type’s support forum wasn’t much help, Karl tried to help but didn’t get much further than I did, etc. I finally gave up, took it out, and kind of made myself forget about the formatting problems.

Then a week or two back I had an attack of the stupids and tried again, and again got nowhere. Again, my hosting company’s tech support was zero help — emphatically no help, I should mention — and again I gave up. And the formatting issue starting pissing me off again and I stumbled across a WordPress design I quite liked (this one, “Coffee Cup”) and I suddenly didn’t like my old design anymore. So I switched blog engines — all because of a captcha.

So now I’m on WordPress and I find that I’m getting a ton less comment spam than I was on Movable Type. I dunno why, I haven’t even gotten around to instituting a blacklist or any spam prevention measures at all, really. I’m just not getting spammed now. (Not that I’m complaining.) So it’s not like I really need a captcha, but … dang, I think they’re cool. I still want one.

So I went out and found a few WordPress captcha plug-ins and I installed them. And I could. not. make. them. work.

Pissed. Me. Off.

Again, my host’s tech support was no help. One of their forum moderators put some time in helping out but he eventually just … stopped. Never told me he was giving up or that it just wouldn’t work on their servers or anything, he just … stopped. Which was slightly frustrating. So I gave up again.

And then there was Stan. (As Beth would say, “Cue angel music: Laaaaaaaaaaaaa!”)

He wrote a captcha for his own blog and he sent me the code to it use here. And of course I couldn’t get it running either. But Stan stepped up and over the course of the last three days he helped tweak and tweak and tweak through email until it worked. And now I have a captcha! Yay! Check it out, kids, give it a whirl, post a bunch of comments about how cool and fabulous it is.

So I’m sending a big shout-out to my man Stan. Thank you very much for getting me up and running with this. Spammers the world over hate you now for inoculating the Lunchroom against them. Well, okay, maybe they don’t, this is such a small site that they probably didn’t even notice, but if they did want to spam here specifically and did notice and did gnash their teeth in frustration, well, they’d be really pissed.

But whatever. Stan, you da man!