Sporkmonger

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.

<rant>

General notice to everyone on the Internet. Please don’t use filters that make use of SpamCop’s blacklists. SpamCop has been blocking virtually all mail from Gmail (at least for me, anyhow) because apparently one user on Gmail sent some spam. So now the rest of us are suffering. That’s an absolutely retarded system. Don’t use it. There are far better ways of stopping spam.

</rant>

Update: Several commenters disagree, and suggest that perhaps a lower weight should be assigned instead of the cessation of usage. I disagree with their disagreement and so on. And apparently I’m not alone.

Update: Better explanation of what’s going on.