Helpful Coder

I need a break... oh well, in these times better to have too much work than none at all! Here's a handy link I stumbled on while moderating new users on a forum I admin - Stop Forum Spam is a site dedicated to ... well, you can probably guess. Anyways, specifically useful is this comma-separated list of IP addresses - you can never keep up with all the new IPs spammers are using, but this should help cut down on the number you have to deal with. The list is quite long, so you may need to paste it in segments into whatever web-based admin you're using, or convert to one entry per line, etc. Probably worth the effort though.

Every now and then you'll run across this - spammers dumping large amounts of apparentl gibberish in to comments, forums, etc. It's very strange - it's not code, and there's no links or anything else of apparent use to the spammer. So why do they bother? I have a couple theories. One possibility is that it is a malfunctioning bot. That's kind of fun to imagine, but seems unlikely. Thinking about how a spam bot would be coded, I'd think it more likely to leave empty comments if something was wrong then long strings of gibberish. The other possibility is that the bot is actually leaving a "fingerprint" in the form of a unique text string. The spammer can then check his work later by just doing a google search for this text. If the spam comes up it tells him several useful things: His bot worked and left a message The message was not deleted/moderated The page that was spammed is indexed by google It'd be possible to have a second automated bot do t...

This is a system I've been working for for probably a couple years now total. It runs on a fairly busy site, and is meant to prevent comment spam. The comment system itself uses flat files, and is a custom-coded ColdFusion system, built to order. I'm not a huge fan of ColdFusion - it seems like everything I try to do with it is about twice as difficult as it should be - perhaps I'm just too used to PHP and Perl. Anyways, I'm going to give a general overview of the system. I can't post code, because the code belongs to the client. But perhaps the general idea of the system will be enough to be helpful to someone out there. So, when someone leaves a comment, it's immediately visible and an email is sent to the admin, so he knows and can take action if the comment is spam. That worked fine for far longer than you'd expect, but eventually the spammers found it and started bombarding him with crap. So, the first line of defense we added was quite simple - it bloc...