“The hardest form to spam is that which requires manual authentication such as captchas.” - LinkSpammer

By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News Network
Friday, February 4, 2005

“The hardest form to spam is that which requires manual authentication such as captchas.” - LinkSpammer interviewed at Register.co.uk.

That validates (from horses mouth) what I have been arguing for long.
Hmm. Have I insulted the horse species in the process?

The trackback is still an open issue. However so far I find them easy to filter automatically.

Filed under: Spam Watch

Tags:
Discussion
February 16, 2005: 1:52 am

Marco,

Thanks for the informative post.

Sorry about losing the comments. In fact the same happened to me also. So now I just select all and copy to clipboard before posting. I saw somewhere a fix for this, couldn’t locate it back again. I have made the text , which advises to save the comment to clipboard before posting, in bold. Till I fix it :)

Angsuman

February 15, 2005: 11:18 pm

Hmmm… I typed the code but I was blocked and as a result my whole post was gone…

Anyyway: I’m the author of Pivot-Blacklist (https://www.pivotblacklist.net/), an anti spam solution for the weblogtool Pivot.

I have implemented a fairly effective remedy against trackback spam. I simply run a blacklist scan (by means of the MT-Blacklist file from Jay Allen) against the content of the incoming trackback. It works like a charm. Hardly any trackback spam comes through.

Regarding captcha’s I personally think they’re an accessibility nightmare. Therefore I have added a (imho) better solution in Pivot-Blacklist: a trivial question. Visitors have to answer a trivial question such as “enter the last two letters of the word ’spam’ in this box:”. Webmasters can change the question in their admin panel at will. It’s very effective and it’s accessible, unlike visual captchas.

Just my five cents of course!

- Marco

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