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.

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