I was thinking about alternative ways to block comment spam the other day and it occurred to me that there’s potentially a simpler solution than the Invisible Captcha approach I wrote about. The Invisible Captcha control plays upon the fact that most comment spam bots don’t evaluate javascript. However there’s another particular behavioral trait that bots have that can be exploited due to the bots inability to support another browser facility. You see, comment spam bots love form fields. When they encounter a form field, they go into a berserker frenzy (+2 to strength, +2 hp per level, etc...) trying to...
Update: I’ve created a new NuGet Package for Subkismet (Package Id is “subkismet”) which will make it much easier to include this in your own projects. Been a short break from blogging, but I’m ready to get back to writing about Cody, I mean code! My philosophy towards Open Source Software is that the more sharing that goes on between projects, the better off for everyone. As my friend Micah likes to say, A rising tide lifts all boats. Towards that end, I’ve tried to structure Subtext as much as possible into distinct reusable libraries. The danger...
I recently wrote about a lightweight invisible CAPTCHA validator control I built as a defensive measure against comment spam. I wanted the control to work in as many situations as possible, so it doesn’t rely on ViewState nor Session since some users of the control may want to turn those things off. Of course this begs the question, how do I know the answer submitted in the form is the answer to the question I asked? Remember, never trust your inputs, even form submissions can easily be tampered with. Well one way is to give the client the answer in...
UPDATE: This code is now hosted in the Subkismet project on CodePlex.
Not too long ago I wrote about using heuristics to fight comment spam. A little later I pointed to the NoBot control as an independent implementation of the ideas I mentioned using Atlas.
I think that control is a great start, but it does suffer from a few minor issues that prevent me from using it immediately.
It requires Atlas and Atlas is pretty heavyweight.
Atlas is pre-release right now.
We’re waiting on a bug fix in Atlas...