We Have Always Been at War with Comment Spammers

This site continues to get 10-30 comment spams a day, along with the occasional comment to an old post that makes it worthwhile to continue offering the opportunity for reader feedback. I'm thinking about switching to a comment form in which the only way to add bold, italics and links is to use buttons that add the formatting in a markup scheme that nobody else on the planet uses. Comments that use HTML or Markdown would be rejected.

Coming up with oddball and ultimately futile anti-spam techniques is a long tradition around here. In 2006 I invented comment flak, a system of putting fake form components on a page and hiding them with CSS so that their use caught spammers. It did not work.

Web Publishing · Programming · Spam · 2017/07/24 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Wait. Why didn't it work? How did the spambots figure their way around it?

And, um buy Viagra or something. ;)

#1 · Ken Yapelli · 2017/08/07

Many of the newer blogs are using Disques commenting software. It works really well at cutting out all the spam. Not sure of the cost involved, but it's worth taking a look into.

#2 · Ali H. · 2017/10/17