Letting the Bad Guys Win
I hate it when the bad guys win. I mean, when we start giving up freedoms and conveniences and various rights just to prevent another 9/11, that’s just not right! As Ben Franklin said, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Another area where the bad guys seem to be winning lately is spam. We all have to deal with junk mail, complicated and fragile filtering, and other spam-induced headaches. I remember thinking 10 years ago that we’d soon have effective ways of managing this nonsense, but the problem just gets more complicated every time progress is made on a solution.
Blog spam is another area where the bad guys seem to be winning. More and more blogs require logins, or OCR-style entry of some code rendered in an image (which the spambots can’t handle), or other inconvenient mechanisms to limit automated comment posting.
One that I really hate is the practice (growing more common all the time) of turning off comments after a certain period of time, so that nobody can comment on your old blog posts. The concept is that this will reduce the size of the target for the spambots to hit, and I’m sure that’s generally true, but I hate it when I can’t add a comment to something I come across. It’s especially annoying if you have something useful to contribute to a question or discussion.
Let’s stop reacting to these perceived threats. Let’s not let the bad guys win!
Having said that, the only reason I don’t have Capcha on this site (like Tom has — go post a comment there and check it out) is that I ran into a little problem when I tried to install it. Then I got to searching on the net and decided I should go with HashCash instead, but it doesn’t work for me. The Submit Comment buttons are always greyed out, as is described in a bunch of unanswered posts on the HashCash blog.
So I’m still looking, but when I find something that works I’m going to install it. I’m getting so much blog spam every day it’s just silly, so I’m going to get the bad guys win this round.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 11:04 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on June 8, 2006 at 2:44 am Elliott Back wrote:
The problem is that your submit button has id=”submit” and your search button has name=”submit.” If you change the name of your search submit button (and any CSS, if needed) you’ll find Hashcash should work for you!
on June 8, 2006 at 3:44 am Tarun wrote:
Hi Doug,
How did it go? How did you find the whole concept?
on June 8, 2006 at 7:03 am Tom wrote:
Actually, I still get occasional blog spam. Not NEARLY as much as I did before I did this, but I think some of these really are human beings sitting down and doing this manually. I can’t figure any other way, unless they have readers that can scan that little block of text and post when it’s clear enough to the scanner. I can’t imagine that’s the case, though - you’d have to send your spam via explicit individual http requests instead of in bulk, which would take a dog’s age (particularly from the U.K. to here, where these posts claim to be coming from).
I just checked, and indeed the Captcha people haven’t embedded the code in the actual HTML (I was concerned for a second that they did some dumb thing like name the image file with the five characters in it). So it would have to be visual “decryption” as far as I can figure.
on June 8, 2006 at 7:06 am Tom wrote:
Hey, I assume you tried this (from the HashCash site’s front page)?
Q: The submit button is always greyed out
A: The problem is that your submit button has id=”submit” and your search button has name=”submit.” If you change the name of your search submit button (and any CSS, if needed) you’ll find Hashcash should work for you!
on June 8, 2006 at 8:19 am Doug wrote:
Hey Elliott and Tom, thanks for trying to help. I changed the name of the search button to blogsearch (view source and you can see it), but I still get the disabled Submit button. Here’s a screen shot:
http://www.mahugh.com/images/blog/2006/06/06/screenshot.jpg
on August 23, 2006 at 2:46 pm Doug’s World » Are You Human? Prove it! wrote:
[…] I started to install a CAPTCHA add-on on this blog a while back, but ran into some technical issues and never finished it up. And frankly, some days I’m glad I didn’t. The bastardized English in which many of the porn spam comments are written can sometimes provide a nice moment of amusement, and it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to scan a couple dozen new messages and mark them as spam. […]
on July 4, 2008 at 8:06 pm The freedom to spam your fellow citizens | Doug’s World wrote:
[…] the thinking behind it. Blog posts about spam generate the most spam, consistently. For example, this post from over two years ago, on the subject of spam, gets more spam comments than any other by a huge […]