Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get access to an automatically maintained list of forum spammers and simply check each new member against it before you allowed someone to register or create a new post? Well you kind of can do that, to some extent, but you may not want to. Here’s why…

There are some BB anti-spam protection schemes out there that rely upon third-party spam reports to build a list of persona non grata in the forum community. I already wrote about Akismet, and you may have heard about another site called bbProtection. While Akisment focuses on the message, bbProtection focuses on the messenger by building a “blacklist” of bad guys as reported by other bbProtection users.

Whether you use a message-based program like Akismet, or you go for the blacklist method that bbProtection offers, you are depending upon a third party to decide whether or not a particular person or message is welcome on your site.

And it’s not really a third “party” you are depending on. It’s just a software program that at the end up the day is doing nothing more than crunching through some probability algorithms, or browsing a “suspect list” and making a decision that affects the quality of the service that you deliver to your members and visitors. That’s not the way to build a thriving forum or blog community.

What if someone mounts an attack against a particular blogger because of a difference in opinion or a conflicting political view? All it takes is a few well-placed spam complaints to a service like bbProtection and a perfectly innocent person ends up having his reputation smeared and his access blocked around the Internet. That’s not the way to build a thriving forum or blog community either.

There are some potential legal problems that could be laying in wait to ambush users of products like bbProtection as well. I’ll tell you about those in my next post.