2005.06.29
Politics and Sports of the Moment
Heh...Patriots' owner Bob Kraft may have inadvertantly given his superbowl ring to Russian President Vladimir Putin...I had a similar thing happen to me when I was showing off my Atari game "Flap-Ping" to the guy who was running Coolidge Corner Cinema's Atari night...he seemed to assume it was a gift and I figured "why not"...
Gripe of the Moment
Damnation, I see the Spam bots have gotten into the sidebar comments as well. What self-centered assholes these pricks are, writing such idiotic posts just to try to crank up their Googlejuice. I'm going to take corrective action soon, hopefully without disrupting the usability of the site...I think that "type in what this graphic says" is just awful, one time tokens should be good enough, at least for homebrew sites like mine.
Hmm...doing a little research and pondering makes me realize it's not going to be that easy to stop...I was assuming that they recorded how to enter a comment once, and the reran the "submit spam comment" script over and over, but there's no reason they can't automate the full "get fresh comment form...submit comment" which would circumvent any "one time token" barriers. And a site I ran into mentioned that it's pretty easy for them to run my form through a javascript engine, thus thwarting any advantage then.
I guess content filtering might be my best bet. It looks like spam almost always has "http" in it...so if there's no http, it's probably safe to let it through. If there IS http:// , cause I want people to be able to share links, I might see what happens if I just put up another form, which then might require some additional action to verify the human-ness of the poster.
Damn spammers screw up the net for everyone. Frickin' product whores.