Spam Comments
February 11th, 2006 by 
Jason
To piggy-back off the post over @ Crashpod, I’ve been receiving a ton of comment spam the past two days. Well over the accepted level of spam comments have been sent my way. All spam, all annoying.
All I can hope is that someone tracks down these asshats and delivers them to Chuck Norris.
Posted in General | 
February 11th, 2006 at 11:16 am
I was having the same problem with several of the sites I manage. I decided on a different route. Before a submission can be accepted, the user must answer a simple question to prove they are human. The question is the answer to the sum of two random number between 1 and 5 (which is better than the ‘type what you see in the graphic’ test, as it does not allow the blind the submit). It has worked 100% since I developed it about a month ago, when I saw a sharp rise in bot submission.
Sample - It still allows a real person to enter spam, but that is much less a problem on my sites. Also, with each submission the owner of the site gets an e-mail notification of a new entry, with a link to instantly delete the post.
It’s a shame we have to go to these levels, but there it is.
February 11th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
Question to michael: but isn’t it possible to program a spam spewing bot to make this calculation just based on recognizing and then adding integers? I always thought it made more sense to ask something like: Pig - animal, mineral or vegetable? - that way the calculation requires much more complicated logic/real world knowledge that a bot couldn’t easily be programmed to figure out on it’s own.
February 11th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Personally, the best bit of information that I got out of these comments is the fact that there’s a band named “Measured Chaos”.
February 13th, 2006 at 9:41 am
First - Measued Chaos is great!
Bots can be programmed to do… well.. anything. They key is that whoever programs them needs to know what to program for. So yes they can. If everyone started using random numbers, then bots would be programmed to find those answers. I think I have bought myself a little time though. Another site I manage simply gives a dropdown box that asks if you are a human or an evil Web bot? (defualt to Web bot of course). Both have been 100% effective so far. And if they begin to fail, I will just change the method a little until the real smart people come up with a better way.