Cutting down on blog spam.

I was having a large comment spam problem. It was to a point that spammers were sending me spam comments once an hour.

I finally set out to do something about it. I could of used Bayesian filtering, but I didn’t want any false positives. Blacklists? Didn’t want my site being reliant on external machines. Finally settled on a “catchpa” – a system of user response.

Unauthenticated users now have to enter a code that’s written beside a box in the comment field when they want to post. Yes, its an annoyance. However, this code is legible enough that it isn’t too annoying, and it has succesfully killed off 100% of my incomming spam.

Maybe one day spammers will try to use CPU-intensive OCR technologies to bypass such systems. But they have so many unprotected blogs to spam right now that it isn’t worth it to them.

I hate spammers. Thanks to them, one of my email addresses is virtually useless now. Spammers are the main reason botnets exist. And now, they’ve forced inconveniences onto visitors of my site and others due to their incessant abuse of a free Internet.