Daniel Lemire's blog

, 6 min read

My Fight Againt Comment SPAM: Spambots pass the Turing test!

9 thoughts on “My Fight Againt Comment SPAM: Spambots pass the Turing test!”

  1. I use WordPress with Akismet and Bad Behavior, and they work. No spam gets published.

  2. Thanks Harold, but my fight is also an experiment to better understand spambots.

    Now, let us see if spambots know about roman numerals!

  3. Peter Turney says:

    I also find that Akismet does a good job.

    What about simply forbidding URLs in a comment? Blog spam seems to consist entirely of URLs.

  4. FD says:

    Programs can easily post your challenge to some other human in return for some commodity (eg, porn) and relay their response to your form. I am not sure if programs are necessarily figuring out the language.

  5. Igor Carron says:

    Daniel,

    Has the certainty about human intelligence being superior to machines been greatly exaggerated ?

    http://www.electric-escape.net/node/958

    Igor.

  6. innar says:

    first-you might look into the log (or log all unsuccessfull attepts)-maybe they are just doing some brute forcing.
    secondly-you should challange them with face or emotion detection from photos etc 🙂

  7. Igor Carron says:
  8. Erica Naone says:

    I know it’s been a while since you posted this, but I just found your reference to it on “The Noisy Channel.” I’m curious if you think there is some possibility that people are being paid to post spam comments through something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk? I’ve seen job postings on there that look dubious to me (i.e. requests to post comments or add bookmarks to some service). If that’s the case, the time and difficulty of solving your puzzles may not be a factor — the pay rates on Mechanical Turk are pretty terrible, and that doesn’t seem to stop anyone.

  9. Interesting comment. How much is worth a comment on my blog? Not very much I would think. I do not understand the economics at play here.