The ReCaptcha MailHide API
I liked Michael Fienen’s post at doteduguru.com yesterday about obfuscating email addresses - lots of good methods to try to hide email addresses from spam robots, even though sometimes we’ve already lost the war on spam and robots scraping out sites. Would the fight be better fought on the spam filter and blocking end? Hard to say.
I tweeted Fienen yesterday that ReCaptcha also has a mail hiding API that makes the user solve a CAPTCHA before getting access to your email address. Here’s an example: i…@highedwebtech.com (hint, click on the … bit before the @).
I like this system because the validation of the captcha is handled by ReCaptcha. You could easily roll this out using their API to many of your pages easily. This method also addresses accessibity as you can get an audio captcha as well.
However, the downside is that a user would need to complete one of these each time they want an e-mail address. I get notes from faculty members often that tell me they want to get email addresses for a bunch of students quickly sometimes and captcha’s and the like slow them down.
Back in June, I blogged about using ReCaptcha on the majority of the forms at my school. We’ve got a centralized system that allows users to build web forms and they were getting hammered. Adding in the ReCaptcha has pretty much stopped that spam, which is nice.
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Preemptive Strikes Against Blog Spam
Blog spam is a pain. It wastes your time, your bandwidth and storage space. Kyle asked today on Twitter for some advice on how to reduce spam loads. Here are some plugins and code I’ve used to reduce spam on my blogs.
Akismet
This plug-in does a very nice job of marking spam and is set-it-and-forget-it easy. You’ll need a Wordpress API key and installation and setup is a snap. Akismet will quarantine comments and trackback pings in a special area so that you can either mass delete them or go through them and check for false positives. I’ve seen some false-positives on trackbacks. You can use Akismet with Wordpress as well as several other systems, including Movable Type.
Bad Behavior
A great way to stop bots from spamming you is to not even let them on your site. Bad Behavior does just that. If you don’t use Wordpress, you can still integrate the code with your PHP-based web app. I once got blocked from visiting a site by BB because I was using a Playstation3. I think BB didn’t like my user-agent.
ReCaptcha
ReCaptcha is a cool project out of CMU. I’ve been meaning to do a whole post on it, but I use it at my institution to reduce spam and it works great. Bad people stay out and as a byproduct, books are being digitized. You can learn more about there here. There is a Wordpress plugin as well, as well as resources for a large number of other content systems and programming languages.
Spam Firewall
One of the issues with Movable Type is that everything runs as a CGI process. This means if your blog or site runs MT, and you have open comments, your mt-comments.cgi script is going to be slammed. This means higher loads on your server, which in turn can lead to degraded performance, and worse, if your site is hosted in a shared environment, can get your blog turned off. My MT scripts are constantly getting killed at Dreamhost. Spam Firewall serves as a gate-keeper for your mt-comments.cgi script by trying to thwart off would-be intruders before they even get in. This plugin is only for PHP-based installs.
I hope this helps you reduce the spam on your blog.
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