Spam, spam, and spam.

Last time I checked spam meant robots. Stupid little applications from brilliant people gone the wrong way. That was the last time I checked and it was a long time ago. Lately spam is generated by Oompa Loompas with enough intelligence to override captchas and all that jazz. Below is the log of my attempts to limit spam on this blog.

Desperate try 1: Trickery

I wanted to avoid captchas because I hate them. So I did some research and discovered some seemingly nice tricks to avoid spam. Hidden fields, randomized field names, timestamps, md5s you name it. The Oompa Loompas started spamming immediately and half a day later the spam bots followed.

Desperate try 2: Captchas

Recaptha is king , right? Help your blog and the world on top. Did it work? No. The Oompa Loompas started spamming immediately. They were filling the captcha fields with the valid words (mostly ips from China).

So far so good: Akismet

Rakismet is a nice plugin for rails, that uses the Akismet service. It’s very easily configurable and you can run it against all your comments to filter out spam in an automated way. You can also support feedback to the Akismet service by using the ham! and spam! methods.

The (sad) stats

This blog-my mom and other relatives are forced to read- has 100 visitors / day in the best case (200 pageviews/day), so it’s not exactly popular. Yet it still accepts some 5k spam attempts per day (luckily akismet will only let one or two slip through). I wouldn’t be surprised if a stat came out stating some 50% of todays internet activity is spamming and even the big players are having a hard time fighting it