Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs

In my last post I told you about some BB anti-spam protection schemes out there that rely upon third-party spam reports to build a list of know spammers who frequent the forum community and blogosphere. I also wrote about why this method of protecting your site from spam wasn’t as good an idea as it seemed from a technical point of view. Today I want to tell you about a few legal issues you may face if you choose to utilize a blacklist.

One of the biggest legal obstacles is that UK webmasters are subject to fines and penalties if they transmit sensitive user data to any organisation that is not subject to the UK Data Protection Act.

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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…

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Every now and then a smart anti-SPAM solution comes along that’s actually worth taking a close look at. ReCAPTCHA™ is one of those tools.

Everyone who reads my blog already knows that standard CAPTCHA utilities have been hacked. And you already know that the best form-based anti-SPAM tools require a modicum of human intelligence to unlock the comments form and allow a comment to be posted.

And that’s why I’m so excited about ReCAPTCHA. Not only is it human intelligence-based, but it’s free as well. And to make it even better, if you use ReCAPTCHA, you’ll actually be helping to spread literacy around the world.

Here’s how it works:

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CAPTCHA or not CAPCTHA… Any anti-spam protection disturbs your visitors. But folks at HotCaptcha.com found a nice trick to compensate the irritating proof-you-are-a-human step. What they do?

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You can have the best anti-spam protection on the planet and still find yourself getting spammed by actual human beings who aren’t using any robots. Fortunately, with the number of forums and blogs on the ‘net, the chances of yours getting targeted by the lone typing monkey is slim. Even so, it does happen.

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CAPTCHA has been broken. Not just once, but over and over again. In fact, do a search for “CAPTCHA breaker” or “CAPTCHA hack” and you’ll find plenty of web sites that are all too happy to tell spammers how to get around the image tokens that CAPTCHA scripts use to try to keep unwanted people out.

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Last time I told you about the automatic spam killer called Askimet. Although this nifty little plug-in seems like the much-awaited answer to the ever-growing problem of spam, it really isn’t.

Here’s the dark side of Askimet

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Askimet claims to be an effective weapon in the war against spam, stopping it dead in its tracks once and for all. Whether or not you’ve had time to try it, here’s what you should know about it.

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The previous posting comes with a big introduction, and the essence is hidden. Highlighting it:

Forum Spammer List, or FSpamlist for short. This, in a nutshell, is an online database full of known spammer’s email addresses, popular domains, usernames, and IP addresses that are all easily exportable so that forum administrators can import them into their forum’s ban lists.