Well, in a certain sense anyways. Most of the time they're just pathetic little programs that try their hardest to post Viagra ads on your site. But over the past few years WebNV has seen more and more spammers access this site and try to post their garbage. I hate to say it but some do get through. And since I'm running my own cms, it means a lot more work for me to try and stop them. Luckily I like a challenge.

Since more and more spambots have been accessing my site and trying to post comments, I've had to adopt several different anti-spam techniques. When I first started my web site I got no spam at all. This may of been due to the site's freshness, or the fact that I was running my own cms and many spambots couldn't figure it out. But that didn't last long. Soon the spammers sent their little spam-droids to attack my comments system. There were only a few at first, but since I didn't have any anti-spam or comment moderation in place, they were damn annoying.

Enter the captcha. Oh everyone loves the captcha. I know everyone's seen it in some form on the web. Captcha's are those annoying little images where, for example, you have to enter the hard-to-read letters and numbers into the box to prove you're a real human. At the time this was the most popular way and acceptable way to stop spam. So I implemented it into my site. Sure enough it stopped the spam, and life was good.

But captchas were annoying and a lot of people, including myself, didn't like them. So many other methods for blocking spam arose. I got rid of the captcha on my site and went for comment moderation instead. But this wasn't your normal moderation where I would have to approve every single comment before it was displayed on the site. Nope. This is the more high-tech moderation in which visitors with previous comments that have been approved on the site, will have all their future comments auto-approved on the site. But if you're a new visitor (or spammer) with a first time comment, then it would first have to be approved by me to be displayed on the site. If it gets approved, then all your future comments will automatically be approved.

This method worked great for me for a year or so. It kept all the spam off of my site and away from all my visitors. But I still saw the spam. When I would log into the back end of my site I would see more and more unapproved spam comments waiting in the queue. And as time went on, the number of unapproved spam comments increased. Soon it would get to the point where I would login and see 100+ spam comments waiting for my approval. Sure it was easy enough to delete those comments, but it was still annoying that I was seeing them. I wanted to stop their comments from being submitted at all.

So I adopted another method which includes a hidden field in the comments form that only the spambots will see. All my normal visitors will not see this field and thus will not fill it out. But the spambots will. And if anything is put into this hidden field, then the comment will not be submitted. Again, this method worked for a while. It drastically cut down the number of comments I was seeing on my end, but there were still a few that would get through. Damn you!

Anyways, here I am today implementing another anti-spam method. This method has to do with blocking access to non-referrer requests. It's a little more complicated, but you can read about it here. I just implimented this method today so let's give it a week and see how it works *crosses fingers*. And as always, if any of my legitimate visitors are having any trouble posting comments, then please contact me and let me know.

Thanks, and wish me luck.