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Re: [Chicken-users] does adding numbers stop spam?


From: Arto Bendiken
Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] does adding numbers stop spam?
Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 11:18:37 +0200

On 7/21/07, Brandon Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
Making a wiki users add some numbers before they commit an edit was
instituted as an anti-spam measure.  Did it work?  I ask because the
CMake authors recently adopted a draconian restriction on their bug
tracker, that only the reporter and the owner of a bug would be able
to make changes to it.  Pretty bad idea I think, so I'm wondering if
the adding numbers trick solved the spam problem.

I can attest to this simple anti-spam method having been quite
effective in other situations and software as well (starting with the
comments feature on my website). Given how trivial it is to implement,
it seems a worthwhile minimum level of spam protection.

If you name the HTML input field in question something bizarre (i.e.,
anything but "sum_of_two_numbers"), I don't think automated spam
software will be able to handle the situation unless whatever
application powers your website gets to be so popular as to merit
special attention from the spammers. So, this leaves you with manual
spam submissions which don't seem to be much of a headache in general
(that is, they tend to be orders of magnitude less voluminous).

For another relatively simple, yet rather clever, spam protection method, see:

http://damienkatz.net/2007/01/negative_captch.html
http://www.nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html

--
Arto Bendiken | http://bendiken.net/




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