p2pnet comment spam
p2pnet.net News:- Hi all:
p2pnet was, a while back, inundated with non-stop comment SPAM, largely from China.
I found, and find, that ironic given the country manages to surpress legitimate email. Anyhow, be that as it may, I was forced to start using a verification system in an attempt to deal with it. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now, but I had to do something.
Quite a few people have complained about it in comment posts and by email and below is my reply to an item I received this morning.
Cheers!
Jon
Hi D:
i’ve been a long time reader on your site but this entry box is getting ridiculous. when it does work it uses characters that are impossible to distinguish and today it isnt working, period.
It works for me and no one else has complained today. So far.
Anyhow, for the moment, I don’t have any choice but to leave the system up. I don’t have the resources to hire a dedicated tech person or people to delve into this, or to go for something along the lines described here – http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1836. So I have to get by with what I have, which isn’t much. My ‘volunteer’ help seems to have vanished into the sunset, and I can’t do anything else for reasons I can’t go into at the moment.
Without the verification system, I’m flooded – and I do mean flooded – with thousands and thousands of comment SPAMs and even now, I still deal with a lot of it by hand.
I’m sure sophisticated business sites with lots of cash, such as slashdot or digg and others, are able to deal with it in one way or another. But p2pnet isn’t a business site. Nor is it entrepreneurial or sophistocated. It’s a one-man band and I do the best I can with what I have, which is very little.
I won’t be posting more comments, as well as a whole slew of other people.
I’m sorry to see that.
I have noticed a huge drop in comments in the past couple of months since you have set this up.
I know.
I could institute compulsory registration. But that would mean the end of anonymous comments. I don’t compel people who want to comment to register, a reality which has been at least partially responsible for landing me in a major libel lawsuit. And I believe you’re one of the unregistered readers.
So, D, comment or don’t comment. It’s up to you.
Cheers!
Jon
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November 20th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
You write articles about Falun Gong and the underground Christian movement. You may also write some articles about protests, etc. CHines government will block your site, and just maybe, Chinese Spammers will be blocked as well.
November 20th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
I must admit that I find the characters a bit hard to distinguish occasionally, but it’s not that big of a problem to me. A refresh always helps.
November 20th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
I too run several non-profit sites. I also have been flooded with all kinds of spams. Yes, verification systems are damned inconvenient, but it is much better than wading through thousands of spams. A better solution would be to hunt down and kill the spammers, but that will not happen very soon. It is a very plausable possibility that these spammers were also hired by various **AA’s. I do not put that past these cartels.
November 20th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Sometimes they’re a bit hard, same with Digg and Slashdot. But its no big deal.
November 20th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
— It is a very plausable possibility that these spammers were also hired by various **AA’s —
That occurred to me as well. But how can one say that about such good, honest and upright folk?
heh
Cheers!
(Second attempt to post
November 20th, 2006 at 7:29 pm
Other comment tolls are possible. The picture-based ones where the person has to pick which squares have dogs, and not the cats or horses or whatever in the other aquares. Or very simple instructions to carry out on strings, like “two characters: the fourth letter after P, nine minus six”. Many systems exist.
November 20th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Jon, could you not have like a question and answer type thing?
Something like type the answer to the question in the box – say “What is the opposite of hot?” and the poster has to type in “cold” to submit their message…
And this was a nice simple code to enter
November 21st, 2006 at 10:18 am
Jon, would it be possible to skip the verification for users who are signed in?
I do understand the need for it, but image-based systems do throw a site’s accessibility out of the window.
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:51 am
The verification system used here has a problem: It can be very hard to understand.
Yesterday I had a combination which included two “circles” and a “line”. To duplicate it, I tried 0l0, OlO, Ol0, 0l0, etc, etc, and i could simply not figure out the right combination.
Any decent verification system needs to omit all the letter and number pairs that look similar – such as the number zero and the letter “O”, as well as allowing both upper and lower case. Otherwise, it gets very frustrating for people who try guessing over and over without gettting through.