Bensmeets.com

Rich Internet, Interaction design and User Experience

Archive for the ‘Vanilla posts’ Category

I can see the spammer whining

Friday
Jan 14,2005

Well the spam busting measure me and Ronald took for flashzone, seems to have paid off just great.

Although the solution we had was quite simple, I had the pleasure of receiving 0 (!!) comment spam messages since installing it.

I can see the spammers trying though :) Since that day i had about 2464 unsuccesfull calls to mt-comment.cgi :)

“Duh, where did it go….. it was here before…. uhm…. now what should i do with all these pills…”

Stop spamming my logfiles you bastards! (That will be the next todo :) )

Spam? Arm yourselves…

Monday
Dec 20,2004

Time to fight back those pesky little spammers. The solution given is as simple as it is effective. No high-tec thingies, just plain old javascript. For those unable to use other anti-spam measures, this might be of assistence.

The idee of this tool is to hide your mt-comments.cgi script for spam-bots. A good m8 of mine, ronald donated some of his pressious time and fabricated a nice and small javascript file which will hide your comment form for the simpler bots.

It might be a matter of time before spammers are smart enough to find a way around this, but the funny part is… it’s easily changed in to something less generic. The more people tweak the script, the less change the spammers will be able to keep up with all the changes.

When using this tool, you will be removing your comment form from your pages, and replace it with a javascript function call. (much the same as a flash form solution) The javascript will print out the form for you. The smarter side of this is, that you can change the name of your mt-comments.cgi to something less obvious, and the only way the spammers will find out is by desiphering your js file. Which probably will be too much effort for them. I tried the script since friday and haven’t received a single spam comment since then. The time I freed now by not needing to delete the spams, is being spend on looking at my log files and counting how many bots are desperatly seeking the wrong comments.cgi file….. ohhhhwww the joy :)

The js needed to use the tool is located here.

Since I’m too busy scanning my log files and having a good laugh about them, I don’t have the time to make it a ‘one click and run’ thingie. So try for yourself how far you can get and if you have any questions feel free to ask them in the forum . I’m sure ronald can be found their too if any questions arise.

Ahhh, this made my day :) But remember though, there are probably better solutions on the web available like MT-blacklist etc. I just couldn’t get those running and came to this after getting fed up with spam.

Monday
Nov 29,2004

Hell yeah. Just spreading the word that makelovenotspam.com is indeed a great effort :).

It might not be much, but the idea of buggering them back feels sooooo good :)

Tx to Lord Alex for the tip!

The screensaver seems to me to be a cute little flash thingie which doesn’t do any harm to my pc…. good job to the creators :)