The eclectic musings of a bitter software engineer.

Comment spammers are easy to fool

Thursday March 22, 2007 @ 10:38 PM (PDT)

A few months ago, comment spam finally started being a problem on wonko.com. Up until that point I had been doing nothing more than setting a cookie to weed out automated spammers that didn't support cookies. Amazingly, that actually worked for quite a while, but the spammers eventually wised up and started supporting cookies.

My solution, since I'm lazy, was to implement the dumbest Captcha in the world: a static, unchanging image of the word "pants". The word never changes. It's always "pants". Nevertheless, I haven't had a problem with comment spam since implementing it. Go figure.

Comments

I look forward to the day I see a "pants" captcha on Yahoo.com.

Thursday March 22, 2007 @ 10:46 PM (PDT) Posted by D

Great idea.. Why didn't I think of something so simple.
Can I steal your idea?.. you can keep the pants!!

Friday March 23, 2007 @ 07:30 AM (PDT) Posted by Dar2000

Have at it.

Friday March 23, 2007 @ 09:38 AM (PDT) Posted by wonko

or you could do the inverse. Include a field thats hidden by a little css. Then reject any post that fills it in.

Friday March 23, 2007 @ 06:02 PM (PDT) Posted by walflour

If you think about it, 99% of websites don't even NEED a randomly generated word. How about just changing the word every two weeks? The smaller the website, the less frequent the changes would need to be

Monday March 26, 2007 @ 08:08 PM (PDT) Posted by David

That is the funniest thing I've heard all day. Thanks for the laugh. (And I was thinking for a while: "Hey, that's a nice looking Captcha, I wish I could see the code he used to generate that...")

Saturday April 07, 2007 @ 09:31 PM (PDT) Posted by enki

eoau

Monday May 07, 2007 @ 04:42 PM (PDT) Posted by aoeu

hello

Tuesday January 15, 2008 @ 04:33 PM (PST) Posted by anung
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