Well, it seems that a few comment spam bots have been doing their best to tart up my site with their links. Somehow they have gotten past the human input validation tool I have placed on my comments. The are possibly using some OCR - and since the font and the background pattern don't really change, I'm not surprised that some software manages to do OCR. I am surpirsed that someone has gone through the trouble though.
You may not have noticed the spam because I am able to get rid of all of it with a click of the mouse. Still, its a pain in my rump to have to lift a finger to rid the site of this plague. So - in an attempt to discourage these evil crawlers that waste my bandwidth and ugly my site - I have disabled comments on all but the front page posts. We will see if this action is enough for them to give up on my site altogether - I would think that the author of the spambot would have placed a routine that checks the success rate of the automated comments... if most attempts fail - stop trying - because its a waste of their resources to continue to attempt to place comments where none can be placed. Here's hoping anyway.
andre
Posted by andre at December 30, 2004 11:25 PMgood idea, yo.
i was also thinking of pre-populating a bit of javascript with a random word from the entry. if the user clicks a link it pre-populates the hidden input field with that word. makes it easy for the user. no one else is doing it, so the bots probably won't scour the code for javascript.
just a thought.
d
Posted by: derek at December 31, 2004 10:01 AMI doubt they are using OCR... I bet there is a real live human doing your Human Input Validation. Yes, Virginia... Comment Spam CAN be outsourced...
Posted by: Alex at January 5, 2005 11:16 PM