flood control option

[Guest dr john]

In my web stats I noticed the same ip address visiting a huge number of times (2237 in 10 days) and googling that ip address strongly suggested it was a spammer (it was 112.198.64.36 if it hits your site, from the Philippines, where I VERY strongly suspected this particular shop would have very very few sales).

I also found the general advice in a forum thread to set the Flood control to reCaptcha (in general settings, styles & misc), to prevent a spammer using Tell a Friend for spamming.

But the option for enable flood control offers no/yes/reCaptcha

So the question is, how good is the protection by just setting it to Yes rather than to reCaptcha? Some of the reCaptcha text is very difficult to read, and I recycled through the other words option four or five before I could read it, and this might affect someone buying and make them leave (it appears on the checkout as well.) I found the simpler display when set to Yes much easier to read.

Any informed opinions/experiences would be welcome.

EDIT: Just noticed a similar thread several posts below, mentioning the weakness - I'm just after options on how good the simpler Yes option is at reducing spam.

[Robsta]

Both work fine. Recaptcha is more secure, but has it's bad points as you mentioned... but that makes it difficult for bots too ;)

[kinetic]

If you know the IP address why not simply block them via your cPanel or other hosting control panel or via htaccess?

add this to your site htaccess file change 127.0.0.1 to the IP in question!!!

order allow,deny

deny from 127.0.0.1

allow from all 

if you have multiple IPs to ban use this

order allow,deny

deny from 127.0.0.1

deny from 127.0.0.2

deny from 127.0.0.3

allow from all 

if for some reason you cant use htaccess call your host and ask them to ban the ip at the server level

if they wont get another host