Daley Ponderings

I got a couple spams through my Lime Daley contact form the last couple days, so I took another look at the script that I was using.  I wrote it a year or two ago, and was my first attempt at writing an anti-spam tool that was designed to have a 0% false negative rate (ie. humans can't possibly fail - as opposed to the image recognizer thing, which I fail about 20% of the time, so I imagine less technical people people must fail and/or give up more often than that).

The one on the Lime Daley page isn't as good as the one I wrote for this blog, but I took a look at the statistics this morning, and it blocked 544 spams last month, only allowing three through.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to tell people about the method, since presumably spammers are smart enough to go looking for anti-spam methods to figure out how to break them.  And really, my method isn't all that tricky, so once spammers discover it, it likely won't last very long.  Although, the version I wrote for LifeType is better, and is easily customizable, so will be a little harder to bypass.  I guess the next step I would need to take is to make the key change on every page refresh, rather than being static all the time; hrm... although if the spammer was really smart, he could look for what data was static and what data was dynamic to figure out a way to bypass it even then.

Anyway, if you know me, or can somehow verify that you are not a spammer, I can show you the method.