1. Myspace, which has empowered people everywhere to bring back the Geocities days of tiled backgrounds and animated GIFs. And sparkle text… so much sparkle text.
2. The Internet Marketer, their presence on Twitter, and their continued vague solicitations to “Market your internet”.
3. The pixel pusher client, because that one art class you took in college does not qualify you to “make the design better” by shifting everything 2 pixels to the left.
4. The family friend that gives you the “honor” of doing a free website for them. (Just wait, it will be the iTunes and Facebook killer – all in one).
5. Internet Explorer and everything it stands for.
6. Web 2.0 graphics, in all their high gloss, beveled, gradient covered, badge-y glory.
7. The use of meaningless stock photography, because a person and three of their coworkers are never that excited about what’s happening on a computer monitor. Stop pointing at it.
8. Tables used to layout an entire website with no tabular data. CSS was invented for a reason, quit using a candle when you have a lightbulb
9. “Dime a dozen” companies that “optimize SEO, innovate solutions, accessibility your HTML, scalability your Photoshop, and buzzword your buzzword. Oh yeah…unsurpassed quality too.”
10. Comic Sans.

For the full text of the declaration, and to sign it please visit Build Internet.

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?