The bots are back in town
by Jean du Plessis
If you remember we moved away from CAPTCHAs in December and replaced them with two techniques discussed in this post: An alternative to irritating CAPTCHAs.
Well in the last week or so those techniques have started to come up short. Now I am not 100% sure whether it is due to the fact that the bots have gotten smarter or whether it's due to manual spam submissions, but more and more spam comments seem to be getting through. It's not like the methods we applied are not working at all, they still block more than 95% of our spam attacks, but its that last 5% of spam comments that come through that really drive me up the wall.
It seems like I might have lost a round in my ongoing fight with the spambots, but the war is not over yet!
Enter my new secret weapon (well not so secret actually): Spam checking via distributed approaches.
Let me explain:
Basically there are services out there (like Akismet and LinkSleeve) that allow you to check the posted comments via their spam verification routines to determine whether or not they are spam.
I wont go into the details of how they do it, but basically you take the information that gets submitted and send it off to the service, they check the content and send you back a result saying whether they think it is spam or not.
I've known about Akismet for a while now and we have tried it out on our trackbacks with great success.
I wanted to give LinkSleeve a try, but in testing I couldn't get it to tag obvious spam comments as spam so I decided that we would stick to the trusted Akismet.
So from now on all trackbacks as well as comments will be verified by Akismet on GottaQuirk.
I'll be posting on some stats in the next couple of weeks regarding the success of this initiative, so keep an eye out.
Subscribe
RSS to Email
Get our latest blog posts delivered straight to your inbox.
eMarketing News
Subscribe to our fortnightly newsletter which is packed with interesting eMarketing news, views and other quirky titbits.
December
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||
Archives
Categories
- General (586)
- PPC & Affiliates (30)
- Search Engine Marketing (94)
- WebPR (38)
- Online Reputation Management (38)
- Email Marketing (12)
- Design (18)
- Viral Marketing (192)
- Conversion Optimisation (14)
- Website Development (38)
- Industry Events (60)
- Quirky Stuff (115)
- Social Media (87)
- Work at Quirk (10)
- Friday Fact Box (24)
- Interviews (13)
- Guest Posts (4)
- Nice Finds of the Week (4)
Recent Posts
- A Day in the Life of Marketing
- Designing for the iPhone
- With Nandos We Can COPE
- Bike Hero
- Heineken Shows the Signs
Recent Comments
- gavich on Designing for the iPhone
- Janine on Designing for the iPhone
- Kelly on With Nandos We Can COPE
- Guy McLaren on With Nandos We Can COPE
- Tony Roocroft on Conversion Optimisation Tools
More photos of the QuirkStars At Play
Name:
Friends of Quirk
Websites:
www.quirk.biz
