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Bah, Spam!

(appologies all, this post is simply a rant, and unfortunatly will almost certainly not reach the people its intended for!)

I just noticed that despite only having a very soft launch via this blog, already gokml.net* has attacted submission bots, which seems to have the sole purpose of seeking out submission forms and sending in their masters details, I guess in the hope of getting that little bit of search engine juice.

I guess need to roll out a captcha and/or email confirmation, or maybe even akismet.com?

(as a sidenote, I have a really old form that was intended for people to submit sites for a geoindex, in the nearby location search, I dont think its even linked anymore but it still gets hundreds of submissions daily, I’ve kept it open basically as a honey pot, but unsure what to do with the data, suggestions on a postcard…)

(* a ‘tinyurl’ site for creating network-links for KML content – must also get round to finishing it off…)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under API, gokml, KML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Bah, Spam!”

  1. Adam says:
    March 25, 2008 at 10:34 am

    Akismet is easy to plug in and works really well, so that’d be my suggestion. As for your honey pot data, maybe you can submit it to http://www.projecthoneypot.org/

  2. Paul Dixon says:
    March 25, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    Try a regular form field, give it tasty sounding name like “comments” or “message” but use CSS to hide it from view. You can label it “leave blank” if you wish, but a bot will just find it irresistable. Drop any form submissions which fill it in!

  3. Barry says:
    March 25, 2008 at 5:04 pm

    KISS :)

  4. Barry says:
    August 6, 2008 at 7:04 pm

    [i]Try a regular form field, give it tasty sounding name like “comments” or “message” but use CSS to hide it from view. [/i]

    working well, trapped about 730 spam submissions that way…