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by Jeremy Voorhis.
Original Post: Open Discussion: Fighting Spam in the New World
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Today, Joshua Harvey and I removed the Globalize project’s Trac. Why? Because we had no filtering mechanism in place, and human intervention is damn near worthless in the fight against spam.
Even before it became a problem for us, I had marveled at the low rate of spam the official Ruby on Rails trac had received, considering it is a public forum that requires no identification to post. I had the chance to chat up Dan Peterson, the Ruby on Rails systems administrator, and he disclosed that he uses mod_security to do filter the bulk of the illicit links. Kudos, Dan!
I am enumerating over the current technology for providing good spam filtering. Recently, Rick Olson has posted about his experiences with Akismet which sounds very promising. The interesting part of the post is the comments – shortly after announcing his integration of Mephisto – his attractive and streamlined bloggish CMS, or CMS-ish blog application – Akismet went kaput. Anecdotal evidence aside, let’s suppose Akismet is really great. Akismet requires you pay a licensing fee for commercial use, and building my application to depend on a third-party service just for comment filtering goes against my sense of aesthetics – any kind of application with a public form could use spam filtering, and it would make sense to make this a service which can be maintained system-wide, like a firewall.
Let’s open a discussion about what can be done to improve the situation at large. Feel free to share any links or advice about spam-fighting techniques in the comments. I have included some of mine below.
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