Using captchas.net to foil spammers
16 May 2006 01:02

<Rant>
In the last couple of weeks I've seen spammers add hundreds of bogus comments to my blog filled with links to their garbage. Get a life people! Go ruin the Internet in some other parallel universe! Nobody wants you here! As a sysadmin I've wasted countless hours dealing with spammers and the resources that they STEAL on a regular basis. They don't seem to care that they lessen the value of the amazingly useful resource that is the Internet. They don't seem to care that they waste huge amounts of people's time, effort, and money cleaning up after their thoughtless messes. They don't seem to care about degrading that which is most sacred and spewing the most despicable filth into the inboxes of any email address they can harvest. All they care about is making a few bucks on the poor souls who they can sucker into clicking on their links.

What's amazing to me is that they've done this even though I'm not using a common blog engine like wordpress. They've somehow taken the time to figure out the form fields (they even submit a bogus IP address) on my little blog which doesn't get a huge amount of traffic. </Rant>

At any rate, I've sent their garbage to /dev/null and have utilized captchas.net to add a captcha image to each comment submission form. There's even a nice Perl module, WebService::CaptchasDotNet that makes using the service a matter of a few extra lines of perl and HTML. If you've got a blog, a wiki, or anything that's getting spammed, captchas.net is an easy solution.