Chet Reads & Writes*

I created a Web site for Fiance and I many months ago. It’s the home base for our wedding information as it stands now, and is updated almost daily by Fiance. It’s a relatively simple, and very, very minimal design. I think she is tired of it, and wants something more. I have a small project under works that I need to knock out, but then I need to do something new for Fiance. I feel something coming up now!

I sat down to pound out this post real quick in celebration of yet another victory by me against the spammers of the world. On aforementioned Web site I added a guestbook. I know they used to be all the rage in the days of Angelfire, but with WordPress and Blogger with their fancy instantaneous comments, no one really uses guestbooks anymore. That is only a problem because when I started that Web site I was still a rather novice PHP programmer, and even younger still in experience with MySQL. Logically I did the next best thing to programming it from scratch, I found a basic script through Google. Sadly enough this script came with no security measures short of the ones that prevent SQL injections.

Over the course of three unchecked months we accumulated several pages of spam. All of it either penny stocks, Viagra or increasingly disturbing porn sites. My first attempts involved CAPTCHAs. I’ve always hated CAPTCHAs, and when I couldn’t program a successful one I hate them even more. I dropped that idea like a hot iron, and decided to attempt the honey-pot method. BINGO! It cleared out all spam I’ve had to worry about, and I get a convenient email every time an attempt is made.

Not long after my initial victory, I ran into something worse than a spam bot, a spam humanoid. The honey-pot method is virtually useless against human spammers. After a few weeks of collecting and deleting spam from real live people, I noticed the one common link among them. They all used the same e-mail service. For the sake of protecting my coding I won’t say which one. Tonight I’ve successfully implemented a means to block anyone using that Web address for email. Sadly though that blocks out a lot of traffic from a large country. Oh well, they shouldn’t let spammers run rampant.

Have any of you out there got any good spam stories?