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Ingenious comment spam prevention system

TomTesterTomTester New
edited January 2007 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
This article http://www.rustylime.com/show_article.php?id=338 outlines a great way to beat comment spam. In short: - they analyzed comment spam - noticed that auto-form-fillers always enter data in ALL fields - so they included a real field in the form but HID it from display using CSS (crucial, hidden fields are also ignored by bots) - now only bots would fill in the 'hidden' field (people never would, because they simply could not see it) - any entry containing content in the 'hidden' field can simply be discarded (either immediately or at regular intervals) Nice nice nice. Sounds like a must-have add-on to me! Anyone? Anyone? (i.e. Stash?) T. PS This is in reference to my other post on a spamming bot demo: http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/5074/scary-comment-spam-botnet-demo/

Comments

  • byttebytte ✭
    edited January 2007
    That technique is not new, it has been around for quite some time. I use it on my own website for a few months already and it stopped about 60% of comment spam. But clearly that's not enough, so I added an extra field with a simple math question generated at random (also a known technique). These two anti-spam techniques combined have proven to be very successful. I have about 1 comment spam a day now. Still not sure how that one slips through though.
  • TomTesterTomTester New
    I guess it's actual human spammers... Like the math question too.
  • byttebytte ✭
    You can take it as far as you want. The more you confuse the bots the better your protection will be.
    Is there much spam in Vanilla forums?
  • StashStash ✭
    Heh, I've up to my gills in work atm, and then I have existing extensions to fix unfortunately, so perhaps the Jazz-Man-Machine or SirNot could sort it out? ;)
  • TomTesterTomTester New
    I was teasing slash... admiring your zeal to make the world (or at least Vanila) a better place ;-)
This discussion has been closed.