Stubbleblog » spam http://www.stubbleblog.com A curious nerd. Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:30:58 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 How Not to Fight Comment Spam http://www.stubbleblog.com/index.php/2005/07/how-not-to-figh/ http://www.stubbleblog.com/index.php/2005/07/how-not-to-figh/#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2005 00:22:11 +0000 Tony Stubblebine http://www.stubbleblog.com/wp/?p=42 Until recently comment spam at work was easily identifiable because of the following style in the A tag.

‘style=”display: none’

It didn’t take long for someone to suggest that all of our comment spam problems could be solved with just fifteen minutes of programmer time. Just add a simple pattern match and ignore comments that matched that pattern. Just!

I think that approach is doomed to failure, spammers adapt. We ended up taking a different approach (delinking) and spammers reacted immediately by testing out a series of new attempts. Here’s my favorite:

<p style=”overflow:auto; height: 1px;”>oreilly (http://www.test.com) </p>

A fight using manual pattern matching is just a test of wills. You may as well remove the posts manually.

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