5 Spam Blocking Posts – A Fight For Future Free Time

What does your front line of spam protection look like? Still spending more than 5 minutes a day weeding through it? I’m not… Over the past month or so I’ve been posting about spam prevention and automated methods for putting anti-spam techniques in place. In them I pass on my ideas, experimentations, and existing samples when implementing anti-spam techniques. Here is a summary of the articles in this series:

1. 5 Ways To Catch And Prevent Website Form Spam – The basics. Checking data using conventional methods such as:
   1. An introduction to CAPTCHA.
   2. $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’] – (Script/domain execution check).
   3. $_SERVER['REUEST_METHOD'] – (POST vs GET).
   4. Escaping data input.
   5. Use of regular expressions.
2. Enhanced Numbered Equation CAPTCHA – Killing Web Spam – A different approach to creating a CAPTCHA. And this time you don’t need GDlibrary or image generating software. Its actually a very simple script that seem to throw off spammers quiet well. You can easily add on to this script to create something much more complex.
3. Automating PHP Forms – Spam Filtering and Data Cleansing – Data cleansing doesn’t have to be so time cosuming. Automate your field usage throughout many forms, or a single large form. Validating unique fields such as Email, or a URL or a Name field, are all just as easy and can be modified on the fly for all instances through a site or on a case by case basis. The function I created here utilizes regular expressions. (ya, its hard to get away from them and still keep the code just as short).
4. Automated Anonymous Spam Filtering and Validation – Focusing more around a comments system (or anonymous input), here’s a few ideas that I’ve tested out in the past. Categorize your needs based on acceptable posts, questionable posts, and posts that are clearly spam.
5. How Akismet And Defensio Create Another Line Of Spam Defense – When all else fails, a last line of defense might mean the integration a 3rd party service as a last line of defense. Here are two good free options which will help you control spam on a blog, or when you develop your own site. This goes through some of the quirks of using Akismet vs. Defensio.

Spam will only be a problem if you let it be. If your starting a project, always consider the precautions you’ll need to take which will save you endless amounts of time in the future.