brian's blog

This blog gets a lot of comment spam - over 600 attempts each day. By the time I'm done cleaning it up, I have no time to write actual posts. (Yes, that's the reason I'm offering for my lack of writing. Buying it?)

So I spent the past few days devising a solution to my comment spam problem: I added a spam trap to the perl scripts running my blog. There are now some hidden input fields on this site that a human with a modern web browser won't see, but a spam bot will happily fill out. If they do, message blocked. If they don't (and none have even gotten this far yet), the message is checked against a spam blacklist just in case.

The only downside is that legitimate users can no longer specify their email addresses or URLs. Emails I'm not worried about - no one wants to fill out their email address anyway. URLs, maybe. Eventually I'll upgrade my blog software to the latest version to offer a more robust solution and allow legitmate commenters (all two of them) to specify URLs.

In the meantime, not a single piece of spam has made it through in 3 days...hooray!