Darn you, spammers.

I was in a rush to get this darn blog finally done, so I threw some stupid anti-spam measures on here. Namely, the comment form included 20 textareas, 19 of which were display: hidden and one of which was randomly the right one, and any text in the hidden ones would cause the comment posting to fail.

It only took a spam bot 48 hours to figure this out, I guess, because the last hour I've been hammered. So I implemented a CAPTCHA as another short-term holdover until I can code up something good. At least it immediately stopped this spam bot whose crap I've been deleting for the past hour.

Hopefully this isn't too intrusive. I think it fits the site fairly well, as you will probably agree once you see it.

This post is related to Clojure 1, PHP 0
March 17, 2009 @ 6:35 PM PDT
Cateogory: Programming
Tags: Spam, Cows, Blog, Web Design

4 Comments

Steve
Quoth Steve on March 17, 2009 @ 7:02 PM PDT

Did you have the style set in the textarea or by a class? Using classes might help throw it off. shrug

Brian
Quoth Brian on March 17, 2009 @ 7:06 PM PDT

It was by class, but they still figured it out. It's probably not hard for a bot to parse a CSS file nowadays. Or maybe it was a human being doing the spamming, you never know.

Steve
Quoth Steve on March 18, 2009 @ 8:48 AM PDT

Meh. That's annoying.

BTW, I really like the new layout. I only read through Planet Larry, but your post made me think about ditching wordpress. I'd hate to lose my archives though. Ah well. Maybe someday.

Brian
Quoth Brian on March 18, 2009 @ 9:57 AM PDT

Wordpress's database is clean enough that you can pretty easily export the data and import it into your own DB tables. The only problem I had was with encoding.

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