[CMake] Fwd: [Chicken-users] does adding numbers stop spam?

[Brandon Van Every]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Arto Bendiken <arto.bendiken at gmail.com>
Date: Jul 22, 2007 5:18 AM
Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] does adding numbers stop spam?
To: Brandon Van Every <bvanevery at gmail.com>
Cc: chicken <chicken-users at nongnu.org>


On 7/21/07, Brandon Van Every <bvanevery at gmail.com> wrote:
> Making a wiki users add some numbers before they commit an edit was
> instituted as an anti-spam measure.  Did it work?  I ask because the
> CMake authors recently adopted a draconian restriction on their bug
> tracker, that only the reporter and the owner of a bug would be able
> to make changes to it.  Pretty bad idea I think, so I'm wondering if
> the adding numbers trick solved the spam problem.

I can attest to this simple anti-spam method having been quite
effective in other situations and software as well (starting with the
comments feature on my website). Given how trivial it is to implement,
it seems a worthwhile minimum level of spam protection.

If you name the HTML input field in question something bizarre (i.e.,
anything but "sum_of_two_numbers"), I don't think automated spam
software will be able to handle the situation unless whatever
application powers your website gets to be so popular as to merit
special attention from the spammers. So, this leaves you with manual
spam submissions which don't seem to be much of a headache in general
(that is, they tend to be orders of magnitude less voluminous).

For another relatively simple, yet rather clever, spam protection method, see:

http://damienkatz.net/2007/01/negative_captch.html
http://www.nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html

--
Arto Bendiken | http://bendiken.net/