Re: spam comments in pybloxsom

Mmm...  I tried posting a comment and got an Internal Server Error.  Not
sure if that's a "i was testing while you were editing" kind of thiing or
not.

Anyhow, your method is pretty interesting.  I think the only thing you
need to do is get the actual secret number text out of the html by
sticking it in an image.  One thing you could do since you have the hash
already in the form is use an image url like this:

   <img src=/cgi-bin/snumber.jpg?hash=xxxxxxx>

Then "snumber.jpg" is actually a cgi script which uses whatever libraries
you like to read the hash file, generate an image representation of the
number, and return it on the stream.

That way the secret number isn't available to the spambot except through
reading the image.  And you can make the image progressively more complex
if you wanted.

Re-reading your email, I can't tell if that's what you're saying is your
plan or not.

Anyhow, that's pretty cool.  If/when you get it working, send us a link
again and I'll look over the code for you.  Good luck!

/will


On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, [iso-8859-15] Jesús Roncero wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I have been hit by a spammer during the lasts weeks who tries to flood my
> pybloxsom blog with spam comments, something really annoying. As I can see
> lots of us suffer from the same pain
> (http://www.bluesock.org/~willg/blog/dev/pyblosxom/commentspam2.html).
>
> Lately I've been working to set up a new home page, and started using
> pybloxsom 1.0 from scratch. So I thought I had to implement some kind of
> spam control or disable comments at all as I have done with my other blog (~ 50
> comments per day of spam).
>
> Ok, so I just hacked a little bit the comments.py plugin to see what I
> could get. Basically I try to mimic what gmail, yahoo and other do when you want
> to open a new account, using distorted images. You could read about it in a
> new entry in my blog, as it is a little bit long to be posted in here:
> http://notreally.org/blog/devel/Python/pybloxsomnospam
>
> As I say in that entry, I am not a very experienced python developer and
> this is my first attempt to pybloxsom programming. I don't know if this is a
> good approach and would like to receive comments/critics and/or improvements or
> if this is a good way to avoid spam in pybloxsom comments :) It looks like it
> works for me (still work needed on generating the distorted images).
>
> Thanks
>
> PS: the web site is in a very alpha state, so it may fail!


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