How To Get Rid of Spam in Web Applications, Forums and Blogs
Posted in Tech News, Tips, Hacks, Tricks, Web Development on Jul 25, 2008
One of the obvious way is to use captcha. A captcha is a group of generated text that a user must then read and enter to verify themselves as human and not some kind of spam bot.
It was always the case that developers try to develop their own captcha system. Either that’s a way to prove their skills, enjoy satisfaction of a nice work, or simply stupidity and wasting time in doing so is another question. Heck, I’ve even seen source code for bypassing phpBB and SMF captcha floating around the net.
I’ve seen quite a few web apps applying the captcha system provided by Recaptcha. Twitter for example, just did. The API is well written and is provided for free in different programming language - PHP, .NET, JSP, Phyton, Ruby, you name it. There’s also a wordpress plugin made available.
By all means, why write custom captcha system when there’s a whole set of system proven working for other people, fully documented with API and provided for free? All you need to do is signup for an API key and you are ready to use it.
BTW, Rapidshare decided to get rid of their captcha on July 2008. Maybe they should just consider using Recaptcha and not using cats and dogs in their captcha.
these capcha thingy is just another thing to make someone’s life difficult. like those cats and dogs thing used in rapidshare, so freaking annoying.
I try avoid using it or atleast, use a very simple one
When you have a site with huge amount of traffic, some people will try to spam the users in it or just register tons of accounts in your community to create content automatically. Having a captcha system is important to protect your community and to reduce your time moderating and deleting spam.
And yes, it can be an extra step for users while trying to register an account or making a comment, but it’s a risk worth taking when you have a huge amount of traffic.
yeah my site gets spamed by “nikeshoes” all the time and its really annoying
i use privacycouncil.org to get rid of all the spam that hits my emails
but all the capcha does is add an extra step
there’s more human then mechanical spammers
I started this thread to evaluate public usable web proxies:
Which are really anonymous?
Which can unblock facebook, myspace etc, in other words: are fresh ?
Which would you recommend?
Thanks for your help,
Dschibut
P.S.: In my country, the freedom of speech is somehow limited, please give me a hint, if you have doubts about your recommendation.