Dealing with spam
April 3rd, 2008
Who enjoys being overrun by spam on a day-to-day basis? Raise your hands…Bueller, Bueller, Bueller. No one? Ok, just as I thought. No one enjoys spam, except for possibly spammers sending the junk, but I do not think anyone particularly enjoys receiving, or combating it (yes you do, sexxy poker island cruise sluts). So with the obvious out of the way, we move on to accepting the fact that it is going to be there no matter what, but what can we do to stop it?
2+2 still does not equal “qm43 online poker sexx”
Yeah, there might be a problem with your order of operations, if you got that one wrong. The math problem solution is a great idea in concept, but can be defeated if the spammer wants to badly enough. They could just have in their script a function that if they get an error on a certain form, they log which page it came from, and even possibly the error message. The spammer could then go through their logs at the end of the day and visit those pages, and modify their scripts accordingly. You could set your math equation to have a randomly generated problem, which is a better solution, but once again, not always 100% accurate.
I cannot read that, nor do I want to, nor do I wish to hear it read to me.
Captcha! Awesome idea again in concept, but there are often times users will have a hard time distinguishing or deciphering the jumbled letter/number combos. This can cause frustration, and the possibility of losing a commenter, which is exactly what you do not want.
style=”display:none as long as css is present;”
Not so awesome of an idea, but I actually saw a method of using a “hidden” div with a form the spam bots would fill out before the presentable comment form, thus booting the spammer from leaving their stench. Disable CSS, or use a non-supporting browser and you might be pleasantly surprised to see that lovely stupid form staring you back in the eye. Not very cool.
So what is the best option then?
Well really that is up to you. The only method I can strongly advise against would obliviously be the last one as it is moronic by nature. You can use real hidden forms, like the one on our contact page, that asks a question, and has a hidden field for spammers.
I just recently installed the “simple trackback validation” plugin, and have noticed a strong decline in trackback spam. I am still up in the air on what I want to do, because forcing the user to jump through hoops is never a good thing. Let’s face it, it is hard enough to get people to read your posts, let alone fill out forms to do so. I mean I guess you can have your users register before posting, but again, the casual visitor might not want to go through that process just to speak their mind.
What method(s) do you use on your blog? Let us know!
- Posted at 10:32 am in development
- Leave a comment