Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs

The SPAM wars continue, and they’re not taking place a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. They’re taking place in forums, Wikis and blogs right here and right now. And while the good guys always win in the movies, this real-life battle is too close to call. In fact, many of the good guys are dropping like flies or throwing their hands up in surrender as they cave in to the pressure of fighting off the spamming hordes.

If you’re running a blog, forum or Wiki, you’re in the war whether you want to be or not. And, the chances are good that your resistance is growing futile.

Inferior Weapons Lead To Defeat

Forum SPAM is mostly all about links and money. Whether it’s Viagra®, Mortgages, Porn Sites, or Business Opportunities, the spammer’s goal is to generate clicks. Some webmasters nip the whole point of SPAM right in the bud by filtering out links from all public posts. But since forums, Wikis and the Blogosphere is inherently all about links, that sort of defense is akin to dropping a nuke on your own army.

Then there’s CAPTCHA, or GOTCHA, as the spammers call it, because their SPAM robots blast right through most CAPTCHA routines like armored tanks through sagebrush. The enemy’s weapons and tactics are getting better and we need to ramp-up our defenses if we’re going to win the war against SPAM.

SPAM-Word Blacklists are small caliber arms compared to the big guns that spammers bring to the battle and even the most carefully crafted and maintained list is no match for the clever misspellings and look-alike words that spammers are posting. It’s time for a new super-weapon that stops spammers dead in their tracks.

I may have found that weapon. More in my next post.

Continue to part 2.