{"id":330,"date":"2007-02-27T08:29:37","date_gmt":"2007-02-27T13:29:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/my_perlfu_is_unbeatable"},"modified":"2013-11-18T00:48:18","modified_gmt":"2013-11-18T00:48:18","slug":"my_perlfu_is_unbeatable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2007\/02\/my_perlfu_is_unbeatable.html","title":{"rendered":"My Perl-Fu is Unbeatable!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve made another tweak to the comment form. Previously, my defense against comment spammers relied upon the Perl operator !<\/code>. Although this stopped most spammers cold, over the last few weeks the spam has crept up from nonexistent to several a day. This is unacceptable. So after some arduous research, I have added another weapon to my arsenal: the Perl operator ne<\/code>. Take that<\/em>, evil spammers!<\/p>\n

In all seriousness, adding the “Yes\/No” radio button seemed the simplest-stupidest possible change I could make, right after the previous tweak (empty text field, type anything you like). I’m not sure if the radio button will work, but we’ll see over the next few days how well it holds up. According to my logs, the empty text field trick was blocking just about 98% of the comment spam. By that I mean, 98% of the requests that were actually trying to post to my real, active comment form. The standard MT comment script, mt-comments.cgi<\/code>, is just getting hammered<\/em>. Or it would be if it existed on this site.<\/p>\n

So here’s hoping the radio button trick does a little better than 98%. At the very least, I like the humor value of asking the user explicitly whether he or she (or most likely, it<\/em>) is a spammer. But if this doesn’t work, I’ll continue to morph the profile of my comment form until it eventually includes a CAPTCHA, a text-message challenge\/response, and biometric identification submitted via snail mail. Remember to please seal<\/em> those plastic bags before sending, people. Thanks.<\/p>\n

(Or I could just use Akismet<\/a>. But that’s kind of a last resort.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Previously, my defense against comment spammers was the Perl operator `!`. Although this stopped most spammers cold, over the last few weeks the spam has crept up from nonexistent to several a day. This is unacceptable. So after some arduous research, I have added another weapon to my arsenal: the Perl operator `ne`. Take *that*, evil spammers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":877,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}