Sporkmonger

purveyor of fabulously ambiguous eating utensils

Bad Spammers! Go Away!

Posted by sporkmonger
Written May 5th, 2007

I finally got annoyed enough by all the comment spam. (Probably upwards of 100 comment spams a day.) To absolutely no one’s surprise, my IP blacklist wasn’t helping much. I’ve now customized the comment submission system in Mephisto to include a CAPTCHA of sorts. Well, really more like a test for an actual Javascript-capable browser. Sadly, the technique requires Javascript to be on, and I was a little too lazy to accommodate people who have it off. If you have Javascript off, and you really, truly can’t turn it on, well, I suppose you can always email me? The rest of site works perfectly fine with Javascript off, and I apologize in advance for letting you become a casualty of the War on Spam. If anyone has trouble commenting, email me, I haven’t tested this thing very well—it was a five minute change.

Update:

I rather like how well this has worked out thus far. Went from 100+ spam comments per day to zero since the code was deployed, with effectively zero chance of false positives. I can live with that.

Tags:
  1. Chris Chris :
    Written May 6th, 2007 at 10:04 AM

    Testing the new commenting system. Seems to work if you can see this! ;)

  2. Written May 6th, 2007 at 04:35 PM

    Better yet, my comment spam levels went from 100+ per day to zero. And if any spammers do take the time to adjust their spamming tactics just for my site, they will discover that Akismet is still working, and I also have an IP blacklist that will block them at the firewall should they turn out to be successful. I don’t know why I didn’t get around to doing this sooner.

  3. Written May 7th, 2007 at 06:06 PM
    <macro:code> spam.works.today => true </macro>
  4. Written May 7th, 2007 at 08:50 PM

    It’d probably help if you closed the <macro:code> block correctly. </macro> is incorrect. You should have used </macro:code>.

  5. Jay Jay :
    Written August 17th, 2007 at 04:00 PM

    I used the Javascript approach with success on my contact forms, but I read about the reCaptcha project, which I’ve been using instead. It uses CAPTCHAs to help process OCR texts from books. Pretty cool stuff.

  6. Written August 22nd, 2007 at 12:15 PM

    Jay, that does seem cool, but I’m really more inclined to have anti-spammer techniques be as invisible as possible. And so far, this one has worked flawlessly. I know it’s not the ideal solution, but I do like it better than image-based CAPTCHAs.

  7. Written July 6th, 2008 at 11:04 PM

    How irritating is it to get all of these spammed messages that state “I didn’t agree with you first, but last paragraph makes sense for me…” especially when the post is absolutely not about anything that could be agreed or disagreed upon! These folks need to at least put some thought into their comments! At least take the time to actually read my postings and than make your comment relate to it, it is not that difficult.

    Computers and the Internet have made things so much easier for us and it is has become for us all a huge time saver, what a drag to get bogged down with such trivial nonsense.

  8. Written July 12th, 2008 at 09:10 PM

    Spamming will always be a pain in the you know what, glad to see that your numbers are going down, sorry to have to add to your numbers, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway, love your postings by the way, have come back a few times to check on what you are up to now and then. Keeping It Real, Allison English

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