My guestbook seems to be under attack by spammers! This is particularly annoying since it is custom-made for a low traffic homepage. I was recommended to go to h1.ripway.com/l1l2/ by Abydosgater, a past friend of mine, to remove myself from all spam lists but it hasn't helped at all and may have just confirmed my ability to be spammed.
To solve this I need to create or use some kind of CAPTCHA for my guestbook to prevent bots submitting comments. Adding CAPTCHA images to Serendipity earlier this year solved the majority of comment spam I had been receiving on my journal. Unfortunately an image-based CAPTCHA makes the page inaccessible to blind users that may be using a screen reader — I would assume, however, that I do not get many blind readers!
The best method would be a simple keyword filter to prevent posting of the short characteristic ‘Great site!’ message I have been receiving. The URLs spammers submit are also identifiably long, usually over 64 characters, and seem to be mostly Belgian: sub-domains of ‘egna.be’ have appeared many times, for instance ‘america-house-model-next-top-yoanna.egna.be’. Having a 64 character maximum on URLs, a 16 character minimum on messages and simply blocking all Belgian domains should solve the majority of occurrences.
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