Re: RFC: CGI::Application::Plugin::CAPTCHA

* Jason A. Crome <perl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2005-08-27 12:06:23-0500]
> I don't disagree with some of your reasoning, but it *is* a  
> speedbump, to be honest. And when you're getting hundreds of mails  
> from a form each day, something needs to get done.

Oh of course, spam is a painful thing. But you can compare "comment
spam" to "email spam". In both cases there are multiple options to
counter it, to some degree. With email, I personally _hate_ these
automatic replies that force me to open a webbrowser and paste some
-too long- URL so my message will get through. Other options are to
use blacklists, spam assassin or anything that's out there that I'm
not aware of. Less annoying to the sender, fairly effective. Anyways, 
I'm all for the following:
1) make it as painless for whoever wants to contact me
2) make it work as good as possible.

And in that order.

As you know, not a single method will work 100%. Being too strict
leads to false positives, meaning a loss of valid mail. Yet sometimes, 
spam emails will get through if you're not strict enough.

> I *am* curious to hear other alternatives to CAPTCHAs.  If you have  
> any, I'm all ears.

I have nothing really that works 100%. Like I've stated before, if
some spammer really wants to get to you, they will. They can hire
some poor souls to manually do stuff, and the porn example[1] speaks
for itself.

However, I've noticed some other solutions. B2Evolution[2], a
popular blogging system based on PHP (yes, People Hate PHP), uses a
centralized blacklist, of which not much documentation seems to be
available :-( The idea is actually pretty nice. Scan the l-users input
for URIs and see if they are blacklisted or not. If so (think of
barelylegal.com'ish and onlinepokergame.com'ish URIs), deny user's
input. If not, proceed with whatever you were doing. Maybe there 
should be a centralized, open source system for this, that all blogs 
and other sites could use. CPAN anyone? ;) I'm willing to host a
mirror for such a system, should someone have the time to create it.

Besides such measures, there is of course also the simple
rel="nofollow"[3].

> At any rate, I'm getting paid to reduce this problem, so I figured  
> others should benefit.  I have a few more tests to write, but look  
> for this plugin to hit CPAN in the next day or so.  Undoubtedly some  
> people will get irritated about how I choose to do things, but  
> patches are always welcome ;-)

Oh, I get irritated by a lot of things, but am always glad that
people release code into the open :) Sometimes -not often- I tend to
change my views too ;-)

  1. 
http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/thespamreport/0,39025001,39120541,00.htm
  2. http://b2evolution.net/
  3. http://www.linkcondom.com/
-- 
B10m
   'Google is Evil'
   -rw-rw-rw-  1 satan demons  0 Jun 06 06:06 google

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