Annoying Spambot is Annoying
A stupid Spambot keeps posting in old posts. (He's stupid because most of his links are broken.) It pisses me off to have to clean the blog several times a day. So I'll do one of two possible solutions.
1) Registered users only. I think Open ID covers registered Bloggers and commenters and gmail users. I think most of the commenters here are already registered.
2) CAPTCHA. (word verification) Personnaly, I think captcha is annoying as fuck, but I'm not the one who's gonna be annoyed. So unless everyone disagrees, I doubt I would use that option.
1) Registered users only. I think Open ID covers registered Bloggers and commenters and gmail users. I think most of the commenters here are already registered.
2) CAPTCHA. (word verification) Personnaly, I think captcha is annoying as fuck, but I'm not the one who's gonna be annoyed. So unless everyone disagrees, I doubt I would use that option.
posted by Sirkowski at 12:38 PM
15 Comments:
Have you considered renaming the "Post a Comment" link to something completely unrelated like "Add your thoughts"?
Might be worth a shot depending on how dumb the spambot is.
Another foolproof way is to block this user-agent: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" -- exactly like that. That is the user-agent used by a completely unpatched Internet Explorer 6, which literally *nobody* uses anymore.
But I've found many "off the shelf" spam bots use that user-agent, so blocking it shuts them out. :)
I'd rather you kept the blogs anon, even with the spam deletion once in a while. Your comic has a lot of international satire, including about America's lousy policies.
If people can post Anonymously, there's some extra security. Things are still traceable on the net, but it's 10-100 times harder to even begin to track down an anon post versus going to a marketing company and getting an IP from someone signing up on one of these "Free" things. And the services don't stop the spam, except in the short term if the original subject isn't that popular. WIRED for instance has tons of registered spam bots that keep coming back faster than they can delete them.
In short, please keep the Anon option in the spirit of the kind of "Underground" appeal.
If you get more popular you can get volunteers to scrub the horrid spam for you.
1st Anon, that's too advanced for my skills.
2nd Anon, all the spam is from non-registered posters so far. And you seem a bit paranoid. X-D Or there people from, like Iran, posting here that I don't know of?
im fine with it as long as no captia i fucking hate toughs things atleast half the time when i type the correct code it wont let me through
You could switch the Wordpress. Spam prevention is really solid.
Er switch TO wordpress.
idk you do get a lot of comments from anonymous. so I guess do captcha without requiring people to register. It's not THAT annoying, is it?
At least you only need to register one time. And most commenters seem to already be registered.
stingsio...
Ok, trying CAPTCHA for a test run.
--Sirkowski
Say, are registered users spared the captcha?
Because spam comment is never from registered users.
It's a pretty clear captcha
I'm logged into my google account but it's my real name so I'd rather post with a handle.
Also openID works fine, people might understand better if you say it's your livejournal/aim/wordpress login
spammers are indeed a curse.
Nope, I still have to type the captcha. I'd be less annoyed if I weren't asked to type it every single time... even when I preview my post.
I guess it's not that big a deal if we get to keep the anons around.
I'm wondering how many anons who don't want to register are going to stop posting because they're lazy to write the captcha...
That's a good point. I guess if there's any less anon posts, it'd be defeating the purpose.
@ Sirkowski:
Only the ones that have absolutely nothing interesting to say.
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