OK, that sounds a bit gruff, I know, but sometimes I just want to pull what little hair I have left out over this issue. I really hate having to weed through the spam on some of my sites. In early 2005, I wrote what I thought at the time was a nice little message board which is dedicated to New Hampshire called, NHBoard.com The trouble however started within no more than 1 month of going live. Spam posts started showing up on a regular basis. It was ugly and I had to do something quick. I didn’t want to require an account to be created because I wanted it to be easy and inviting to post something. This of course makes you vulnerable to automated spam postings. So, I created an email verification mechanism. This requires that after posting the message, you must then open your email and click on the link which then activates the posting. Even after that, I still received spam. Lots and lots of spam. I then added an assortment of keyword filters. This simply doesn’t activate the posting if a keyword or phrase from the list appears in the posting. You would think that after all of that, I would be free. However, that’s just not the case. At this point I’m under the impression that I am dealing with actual people sitting in front of their computers manually spoofing the system. Ugh! will it ever end?
This is a free application with no commercial aspirations currently so I don’t want to deal with manually approving each posting. I would love to know what you all are doing to avoid the ever increasing automation of spambots across the web.
Vince Collins
