Stupid Spammers
I knew that it was only a matter of time; but whoever writes the spam robots had finally adapted to the anti-spam measures that I was using on the shoutbox. The funny thing is that I don’t allow URLs in shouts so there’s really no purpose. That’s the problem with spam. It causes aggravation for everyone even when the spammers are getting nothing out of it.
I know that there are online services that block spam; but I’ve never been comfortable sending comments and shouts that people have left for us off to a “big computer in the sky” to be checked. Maybe they delete them after they’ve been analyzed; but they’ve got to make a profit somehow so they must be doing something with all of the data they collect.
This site doesn’t have a written privacy policy; but, if it did, it would be simple. We don’t share information what we have with anyone. We don’t post the text of any emails that we receive (even if they are interesting). And we don’t reveal IP addresses. We do this for fun and would like for people to respect our privacy and anonymity. So we do our best to respect theirs.
Tags: Geekings
August 5th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Use akismet. it comes as a plugin for wordpress. we use it, and it blocks thousands of spam a month on our babes pages and probably a couple hundred from my page.
August 5th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Just thought you might want to use recaptchas…. Not sure if this is what you want, but itś a project that uses the captchas like the one you already have and uses the typing in of the word to help convert old texts to a searchable format. So no strings attached on the use of the captchas. Just a thought.
August 5th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I hate spam!!!!
August 11th, 2008 at 12:03 am
Kate: I tend to stay away from third-party (i.e. non-local) solutions. Not because they don’t work; but because I like to make my own rules. For example, when I first got stared blogging, a tool that I was using had a “curse world filter, which is not a good thing or an adult oriented blog. I had the code; so I was able to modify it; but I wouldn’t have been able to if it was a service.
Eddie: I’ve looked at recaptchas. I fact I think it’s an interesting idea. But I’d like to keep the shoutbox as simple as possible. It’s not much of a chat if you have to type a code word every time you want to send something.
Jerry: So do I. And the worst thing is that most blog spam these days is referral spam to increase someone’s page rank. So people don’t even have to click on it to make it useful. Blog owners just have to be slow deleting it.