---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Arto Bendiken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Jul 22, 2007 5:18 AM Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] does adding numbers stop spam? To: Brandon Van Every <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: chicken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On 7/21/07, Brandon Van Every <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Making a wiki users add some numbers before they commit an edit was instituted as an anti-spam measure. Did it work? I ask because the CMake authors recently adopted a draconian restriction on their bug tracker, that only the reporter and the owner of a bug would be able to make changes to it. Pretty bad idea I think, so I'm wondering if the adding numbers trick solved the spam problem.
I can attest to this simple anti-spam method having been quite effective in other situations and software as well (starting with the comments feature on my website). Given how trivial it is to implement, it seems a worthwhile minimum level of spam protection. If you name the HTML input field in question something bizarre (i.e., anything but "sum_of_two_numbers"), I don't think automated spam software will be able to handle the situation unless whatever application powers your website gets to be so popular as to merit special attention from the spammers. So, this leaves you with manual spam submissions which don't seem to be much of a headache in general (that is, they tend to be orders of magnitude less voluminous). For another relatively simple, yet rather clever, spam protection method, see: http://damienkatz.net/2007/01/negative_captch.html http://www.nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html -- Arto Bendiken | http://bendiken.net/ _______________________________________________ CMake mailing list CMake@cmake.org http://www.cmake.org/mailman/listinfo/cmake
