11 Jan 2005 skx   » (Master)

Guestbook Spam

It seems like spam is everywhere.

First it was email spam, then it was blog comment spam. After that came trackback-spam.

Now we have guestbook spam.

This (obsolete) guestbook was setup a couple of years ago when I hosted a project at SourceForge.

It's been filled with spam since then, random links and adverts, presumably via some kind of automated bot.

I've seen a lot of spam solutions for blogs, wordpress, movable type, etc. But nothing anti-spammy for guestbooks or random online scripts.

It seems a generic solution would be ideal, much better than my hacking on a guestbook script, then a voting script, then a form-mail script.

Something like CGI::AntiSpam which would examine all the submitted fields and apply a test maybe?

For the moment I'm just gonna hack all guestbooks I control to require that data be approved, otherwise it's hidden... A perfect thing to do on a busy working day ;)

Advogato

Seems to be suffering again, the recentlog has been blank for most of the day.

I've lost my main account, and I'd greatly appreciate being certified if you've known me or used anything I've written.

Whilst my previous rating of Master was probably inflated it'd be nice to be able to post comments to articles ..

In the dim and distant past I even posted articles myself! I've been working on optimizing code via selecting GCC compilation options via Genetic algorithms, which I'm tempted to write about. (Hardly original, but interesting regardless).

</ObWhine>

Given Advogato's problems seems like a perfect time for somebody to setup an alternate site - there's updated code from R. Steven Rainwater .... Just a thought.

To make this latter point more interesting - I had to recreate my account today. Two disappearing accounts???

all my certification has been wiped - this google cache shows my old certs.

*sigh*

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