Posted by tim in It wouldn't fit in any other category... on November 14, 2006

I have added a contact form to the site, here. It doesn't follow any other color scheme you've seen, and it may look a little unfinished.

Actually, it's part of an experiment. I read that one way to help filter spam is to use a little bit of CSS to set display: none; on a couple form items. Then, when your form is posted and processed, check the value of the non-displayed form items. If they have been filled in, mark the message as spam and discard it. Otherwise, it's likely to be legitimate.

I've had a fair amount of spam on this site over the last couple years, which is why anonymous commenting has been disabled. It's also why I have no "register" function on this site. Since I draw a fair amount of traffic from spammers, I figure this may be a good way to handle it. If the numbers look good, I'll be tying it into my "blog_bans" table, and automatically ban any spam bot's IP.

The contact form works, but for reference, if they are visible:

  1. Don't fill in the first "Your Marketing Website" field
  2. Don't check the "I agree" box

I'll probably leave it up for a couple months and see what happens. I may also create a dynamic pie chart off the statistics table.

Edit: Pie graph. Right side. Look!

  • I R BLEU PIE

  • Very good idea mate, I am interested to see if it flags anything.

  • Macguy, I fixed the bleu pie. :P

  • that is pretty cool, u could make a spam thermometer or something.

    it is also a more user friendly way to filter spam submission than those word pictures that everyone uses...

  • Shiiit that's a lot of spam.

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