Fri, 28 Apr 2006

Dealing with blog spam

Julien, the majority of comment spam can be dealt with very simply by including a turing test. On my blog, when I first started getting comment spam, I added a check box asking if the poster was a human. For a human, it's not a massive inconvience to tick a box, but for an automated tool, it's a major problem. Was implemented in 3 lines of html and one line of python. Since I added it, I haven't recieved a single piece of spam.

I don't believe it's had a major effect on people commenting, although I currently can't tell. I could change it to hide posts that claim to be non-human until I've checked them. If spam tools work out this simple problem, I could change the nature of the test to randomly change between "I am a human" and "I am not a human". After that I could include a simple sum or some other simple question. It also has an advantage over captchas that it is accessible.

It is a simple change which massively reduces spam by increasing the cost of spamming and I'm surprised that most people don't do something similar.

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Sun, 04 Sep 2005

Oops

Jesus, not an email gateway, but running a bulk spam-teaching script for spam assassin run in an inappropriate directory, which insists on writing to disk despite me clearly telling MIME::Parser to use internal memory structures. I'll just go stand in the corner.

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