Thread

I found this mentioned in the forum,http://www.iheartrant.com made with Codeigniter, as you can see a viagra spammer has been spamming it like mad, if you click on the pagination links it just keeps going and going of this viagra spam.  :roll:

With a site like that you need administration. It is going to be mind numbing but you don’t want the people to be discouraged to add something. Rant mode only last for a short while although there are people that are in continuous rant mode 😊

A captcha is not a silver bullet solution, even google knows this 😉

Well one way to stop them is take away what they want and usually most spammers want
a live hyperlink (For Search engine optimization)

Put rel=“nofollow” on any user submitted links. This is what the blogging world did sometime, now all links on blogs have nofollow on them.

If you look on the iheartrant site the Viagra spammer is inserting links into rants where his username is, the links don’t have nofollow on them.

But if those links did have Nofollow on them it would a complete waste of time for this spammer to be doing that. But still some still think the SE bots will still count links with Nofollow on them so blogs still suffer from comment spam even to this day.

But Then I guess the solution would be just remove the live links all together from user submitted comment and any spamming would be fruitless all together.

I don’t think CAPTCHA’s should be used in all situations.  The site you linked to would be doing much better if it implemented a SPAM filter like Akismet.  That site looks abandoned anyway.

I Just noticed iheartrant is PageRank 3 in Google. This is what attracting the spammer. He can put spam links into the rants and get PR juice off the page to get his spam indexed.

Then you are treating your site users as criminals. What if someone adds a link to a legitimate blog/site?

A way to prevent spam to get through to some extend is to check the bad word percentage. For example :

$bad_words = array('viagra','pharmacy','buy','purchase','cheap');

If all words are found the submit will be put in a sandbox but you could set it that if 3 of the 5 words are found the submit goes to the sandbox.

If you have a dedicated administrator or a team of administrators you can trust you could set up a email notification system to (dis)allow the submit.

I like http://akismet.com/ as an anti spam solution, it stays out the way and seems to catch most spammy messages.

Then you are treating your site users as criminals. What if someone adds a link to a legitimate blog/site?

A way to prevent spam to get through to some extend is to check the bad word percentage. For example :

$bad_words = array('viagra','pharmacy','buy','purchase','cheap');

If all words are found the submit will be put in a sandbox but you could set it that if 3 of the 5 words are found the submit goes to the sandbox.

If you have a dedicated administrator or a team of administrators you can trust you could set up a email notification system to (dis)allow the submit.

Most spammers don’t use words like that in the post. Alot of the time the post is done manually by the person who owns the site or by someone in India working (Indians work for cheaper then someone in USA for example) where there paid by someone to visit sites that dont’ have nofollow and allow user submitted comments with links. They’ll post rather innocent looking comment with there username linked to some site there paid to do seo on.  So you might get a comment like this on your blog that look innocents but was done for SEO purposes.

***comment
username: Free Quality hosting Link: somehostingcompany.com
comment: Hey I like your article here it really interesting thanks for writing this.
****

If you don’t belive me visit Forums.digitalpoint.com there is tons of spammers on that site talking about how to get links and all this stuff.

The point i’m trying to make it that captcha’s are not the only way to prevent spam and that spam prevention should be easy on the legitimate user.

The point i’m trying to make it that captcha’s are not the only way to prevent spam and that spam prevention should be easy on the legitimate user.

Ya for iHeartrant a captcha would be not the best way as you want to a make it easy for them to submit a rant. Perhaps maby I should retitle my thread here I agree with your saying.

Personally a little trick I learned to stop any type of automated spam is too escape the comment form with javascript with this.
http://scriptasylum.com/tutorials/encdec/encode-decode.html

Bots don’t parse javascript, so the form will not exist on the page for the bot to fill out.
So it stops them dead in the tracks. I had site I made with wordpress and got about 20 spams a day, and I encoded the comment form in this way, and I never saw a spam again on the site.