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Spam? I don't like spam! BoneyJellyfish - 8/25/2006What's a total pain in the ass that's been wreaking havoc upon the site for the past six months? Spam, that's what. Long, long ago, I'd log in to find maybe a viagra spam message or two, totally innocent. Eliminating the spam was just something that I did naturally, almost as if it were an afterthought to maintaining the rest of the website. But now, removing spam has become a horrifying chore that I've come to dread. After being away for a week on vacation, I checked the database and discovered, much to my shock, that my innocent little guestbook had received over two THOUSAND spam messages. That's a two, followed by three zeros. That's how big the problem is.
Well, it's obvious that the anti-spam systems that I've coded are doing very, very little. My filters are only eliminating 10-20% of the spam, and that's a number that I absolutely cannot tolerate. In addition, that percentage is shrinking day by day.
Now then, I have a few options available. First, I can make it so that you need to register on the forums in order to comment. This would probably be the easiest, and most effective means to combat the spam, but it would remove the attractiveness of the comment feature. Second, I can continue making almost seemingly pointless additions to the banned word database that I've created. Third, I can remove the comments altogether... or not. No, never going to do that. Fourth, I could program the comment forms to ask a random question, which the user would have to correctly answer. Lastly, I could put an image containing a confirmation code--much like the one you see when you register for a forum account--in each comment form. This would be a pain in the ass for people who want to just post a comment, but it would do a heck of a lot to mitigate the amount of spam.
Really, as I see it, the easiest way for me to beat the spam is to tie the comments to the forum. I really, really don't want to do this. If anybody has any suggestions, please give me your input. As I write this message, I'm still deleting those 2000 spam messages.
Also, if I don't get rid of this spam, who will see what I masterfully did to dante's comment in the Scryed page?Comments: 5 — Make a Comment
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» BoneyJellyfish -- Also, as for where I've been, I had a nice job in the summer that gave me plenty of free time (this is when I posted about episode 3 of spiderman). Well, I got laid off, and I've been working two jobs almost every day since June started in order to pay off college fees.
Oh, and DB, I deleted your comment by mistake. :( » hinatasou -- Yea I'm getting the same problem at my Animesou website. For the past month it's been increasing. Even at the forums, bots register accounts and make disruptive porn topics. » DB -- :(
I think ansvering a simple question is the least bothersome method for the poster. Ansvering a question like "What colour is blue"? really isn't that hard.
Since you're hardly the only suffering from this there is quite a lot of code available to deal with comment spam.
http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2003/10/12/anti-comment-spam-tactics/
http://www.blogspam.org/solutions.html
http://ideas.4brad.com/node/228
Then again I think I remember you wanting to write everything from scratch yourself.
Of course you could always hire some Bangladesh children who manually remove the spam for a couple of cents each week. » BoneyJellyfish -- Yep, everything you see has been hand-coded from scratch, and I don't intend to change that. I'll put the random question in for people who aren't registered on the forums. » KaeMeera -- I use gmail for my email and it has a whole other section for spam. The problem is, it doesn't have a filter feature. I cannot Block anyone from sending me emails. I really like gmail and don't want to switch or make a new address but it seems I'm going to have to.
What am I getting spammed with? Short stories and oil stock market quotes/info. -_- Should I consider myself lucky they're not mailing me about viagra? heh. |
