Weekend Update with Your Host Brent O'Connor
This weekend I did some minor upgrades to this website. I wrote a captcha class in PHP for my contact form. It was a lot of fun creating it and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out and so far I haven't had any spam through my contact form. I know captchas aren't fool proof but so far it's been a really good stop gap solution. I signed up for del.icio.us, digg, newsvine, blinklist, and magnolia and I found it interesting that most of them used a captcha during the registration process. Along those same lines I added a link so you can bookmark any of my articles that you might find interesting using del.icio.us, digg, newsvine, blinklist, and magnolia.
I've never really received a ton of comment spam, maybe 3 or 4 a day at the most, but it's been enough to be annoying. I made it so that I can block a spammer by their IP address and that has helped but it's not perfect by any means and it's not proactive. So I decided that I would try to do something that is proactive as well. I've noticed that most of the comment spam that I get had common keywords so I decided to add keyword checking. So far since I've added keyword checking I haven't received any comment spam which is nice.
I could use my captcha for blog comments and require that a visitor type in the captcha code before submitting a comment. However, I don't want to do anything that drastic yet. I realize that captchas aren't very accessible to blind people and it can be annoying to type in that code every time you want to leave a comment. So for those reasons I'll hold off on using a captcha for comments.
- Save this article for later, bookmark it!
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del.icio.us
digg
newsvine
blinklist
magnolia
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Good Reading
- A bunch of presentations on scaling websites: twitter, Flickr, Bloglines, Vox and more.
- Good links and presentations I'm going through about scaling websites.
- Upside-Down-Ternet
- Now that's a good April fools joke!
- Animator vs. Animation by Alan Becker
- Pretty cool flash animation that a friend showed me.
- 30+ Useful Websites You Probably Didn't Know About
- Looks like some good websites that could come in handy. The GetHuman website definitely sounds useful!
Comments
Hell, you could probably even have that field and have the DOM fill it out for the user, thereby requiring Javascript (which I presume most comment spammer’s bots don’t have).
Have you seen any websites that are doing something likes this already? I don’t recall ever seeing any.