Key Battles Against Comment Spam Won
Comment Spam
I'm not declaring total victory in the war against spam because this war is much like the GWOT, it will take decades to win. However, I can now declare victory in a key battle in this war against comment spam in particular. What is comment spam you ask? Well, it is similar to the email spam you're no doubt familiar with except that it shows up in your blogs and online forums as unwanted posts.
For a while now I've been getting ridiculously inane posts in my BugLOG from spawns of spam hell very much like this:
video gambling games: Umm, that gambling is much less ashamed than the unobtrusive video slots. Goodness, the video slots is much less flawless than a spontaneous video gambling games. I chose that online casinos with a gambling. According to common sense, an online gambling is much more contagious than some fluid video slots.
I had simply turned off the ability to comment on my entries because of this. But I began thinking how I could determine whether a spam robot was visiting my page versus a human being. Virtually all the spam that ends up on your entries comes from automated bots and not real people sitting there posting this crap. One of the most obvious things that came to my mind was to detect whether the mouse had been used at all prior to posting a comment. It turns out that the bots do not meddle in any way with the mouse functions of a page so all I needed to do was to check whether the onmousemove event had ever fired. This works perfectly!!!
Now I can have my blog back to the way I like it, open and free for real folks to comment on. And just so I can keep appraised of attempts at spamming my blog, I now see entries like this in my log files:
A spambot attempted to post a comment to entry #108 (video gambling games: Umm, that gambling is much less ashamed than the unobtrusive video slots. Goodness, the video slots is much less flawless than a spontaneous video gambling games. I chose that online casinos with a gambling. According to common sense, an online gambling is much more contagious than some fluid video slots.)
Email Spam
I believe I've found the best Outlook anti-spam solution available and it is Cloudmark Desktop (formerly Safetybar)
It claims a whopping 98% blocking rate for spam and phishing emails with zero false positives. When I first began using it I was very cautious because I had recently dumped McAfee's Spamkiller which was extremely poor. But the more I used Cloudmark's product the more I realized their claims were not exaggerations.
The beauty to why it's such a successful approach to fighting spam is that it is not algorithm based but community based. Over a million users of this product cast their votes for whether certain messages are spam or not. At first this may sound risky but in practice it works extremely well. There are of course several more layers of complexity to the process but the community based spam identification is the key to this products success.
The only down side to this is that I actually have to pay for software to fight something that should not exist in the first place. But as long as there is spam to fight I'm sticking with Cloudmark's Desktop as my primary weapon.
GENIUS on the mousemove thinking!
Being around open software forever I can honestly say with at least a small measure of authority that that approach has never been used before! Daggum neat man.
video gambling games: Umm, just kidding.
Comment spam, I've ended up using asking a question and other systems. Your system is a lot better, just wondering what mouse-less people will do.
I have yet to buy anti-spam software, but what has worked wonderfully well for me has been setting up a machine solely for my mail (when you receive a minimum of 700 messages a day, you need a machine dedicated just for this, I'm afraid).
Between checking for spam, viruses and all the other checks and filtering, I get maybe 1 or 2 spams a day (about 70% of incoming e-mail tends to be spam).
I'd much rather get the odd piece of spam and know I am getting all my e-mails than the other way around--and would probably be happier with even no spam at all, but the results are extremely well done with a usable mailbox once again.
Good luck.
leandro
Thanks, JK =)
leandro, mouseless people are a bit out of luck with this approach but there are probably other checks that could be done to accomodate them.
Thanks for the link!
Interestingly, I got a message from an individual via the log file. Larry V. pointed out that this will only work until the bots come equipped with javascript. That is certainly true and that is why I called this winning a battle and not the war. I've got a couple of other tricks up my sleeve once they figure this one out ;-)
Umm, that gambling is much less ashamed than the unobtrusive video slots. Goodness, the video slots is much less flawless than a spontaneous video gambling games. I chose that online casinos with a gambling. According to common sense, an online gambling is much more contagious than some fluid video slots.)
Cute ;-)
So far it's still holding up.
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