It only took seven hours after opening up registrations for our first spammer to sign up. I suppose one must admire their speed. So far that account is the only of several spammers that has posted an annotation (since deleted). I’ve disabled those accounts but that doesn’t stop more spammers registering.

So, as well as the “captcha” on the registration form (the squiggly words you have to read and type in), I’ve now added a question that must be answered correctly before the form can be successfully submitted.

I’ve started it off with an easy question (the same as we had on the old site for posting annotations) but I’ll change it if the spammers are too wiley. We’ll see how this goes. It’s a shame we have to make this more complicated than it should be.



1 Comment

Second Reading

Richard Birdsall  •  Link

Thanks for bearing such a burden. I run a small college blog for students and staff and have, in the past few months, averaged more than 5,000 spam entries each month. The interface between the site and the larger cyber constellation truly is a "DMZ".

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