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Blocking spam in the short term

Written by Matt B · first published 09/02/2008
My apologies to my regular and irregular commenters but I have had to activate an anti spam question while I write a more sophisticated way of filtering junk. While irritating it is less irritating than seeing six thousand links for the local blue pill. This anti spam question takes the form of a random and dead easy question that is added to the form.

It will remain until I have the time to write a sophisticated filter that can actually analyse the comment and figure out if it is spam. I could bore you with the technical and geek details (think "Bayesian methods" or the like) but the short story is that I have something in mind. Until then, sadly, you have to answer a stupid question to post a comment.

Sorry.

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Public Comments

Michael Clild wrote:

Matt I hate to say this but the only way I have managed to deal with sinking under both email and blog spam is aol.com and blogger.com I have tried the geek approach and it failed with the emails, letting through spam and deleting my customers orders. The only difficulty o find with blogger is that I can’t post on it from my mobile pda and with aol that I cant access my email with it.
10/02/2008 10:52:28 AM

Matt B wrote:

My email is a done deal, more or less, I use spam assasin server side and Thunderbird client side. Also I only have a few inboxes that I keep active for others and lots that I expire. This keeps my address out of the hands of spammers.

As for comment spam, I beat it at other sites by using captcha but I am aware that more subtle methods can work. I think the solution I have brewing will do the job nicely. Blogger.com is far to limited for me.

I can see why so many people give up though.
10/02/2008 02:16:02 PM

Matt B wrote:

While we were saying that some kind soul sent me 20,000 spam comments. While around half of those came through before I noticed they did provide excellent training for the new Bayesian style AI system.

The trick is to defend the system with layers. Layer one is the user layer - this can have a question, image or some other humanity test on it. The next layer is the core where the data is inspected for quality. But a wrapper layer can be added that detects the bots before they start acting up.

So far I have two of the three in place and everything is holding up. When I am done even a whisper of spam will be rare. No one attacks my servers to any gain, ever.
10/02/2008 08:14:15 PM

michael child wrote:

Matt the problem with email is that if you are in business you have to retain the same email address for years and publish it on the web as much as possible. I used to use my domain email and generate @michaelsbooksbop.com addresses in the end I was having to look at 100s of spam emails a day.

I also notice that you don’t come up on Thanet blog list, recent feeds but am not sure if this is something to do with your settings or endemic to your hosting.

I am considering ways of making the michaelsbookshop.com site more interactive and something interactive in the shop window maybe based on some sort of ipod technology or possibly some sort of capacitive activated touch screen that I could stick on the inside of the glass.

Can you imagine the problems with some sort of news blog that people could operate from the street? Frankly I think we are going down the road where technology and promotional equipment that isn’t interactive won’t even get noticed.

But certainly something similar to a blog that can be operated free from the street by anyone is a road I very much want to go down, any ideas greatly appreciated.
11/02/2008 10:51:38 AM

Matt B wrote:

Of the top of my head I can think of a few products that might be something like what you are looking at. The total investment is going to be coming up on four figures and I would not be at all surprised if it went past that mark before the end. I'll try to email you some thoughts on the subject in the next few days.
11/02/2008 02:39:09 PM

Michael Child wrote:

Matt I am thinking in terms of a lot less money one option could be http://www.thinkgeek.com/co... another controlling functions in a similar way to the way the playstation eye toy works or perhaps something like the old Sinclair touch sensitive keyboard.
12/02/2008 12:55:29 PM

Matt B wrote:

I'm currently looking into some newer technology but so far I have no idea of price. In theory the ideal solution would be sufficiently inexpensive to start a trend.
07/03/2008 01:46:58 PM

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