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Blogs ยป Archive for August 3rd, 2005
Dealing With Automated Form Spamming
Anybody who develops or maintains blog software is likely to be all too familiar with the problem of comment spamming.
I recently became the victim of spamming through a ‘contact’ form. The results of the contact form are emailed privately to a member of the site, and not displayed on the Website. However, this didn’t seem to deter the spammer - they were using an automated bot to send hundreds of them.
The CAPTCHA is a method for preventing automated form spamming which requires the user to fulfill a task that a computer would have difficulty doing - usually recognising letters or shapes in an image. However, not only does the CAPTCHA suffer from some relatively obvious flaws, but it impedes usability and accessibility, which will reduce the number of responses you get. Another flaw to the CAPTCHA is that it implies that you can trust human users while you cannot trust computers - a flawed assumption, given the number of human users with a lot of time on their hands compared to the number of people clearing up their spam. It breaks the don’t trust any user input principal.
Like Bayesian spam …
Fixing the ‘onClick’ in Dreamweaver
Here’s a Dreamweaver tip from the ‘fishing with dynamite’ department.
Although it’s not the ideal tool for all tasks, Macromedia Dreamweaver is a very useful tool.
However it has one particularly nasty little habit that has bugged me for a while now — an infuriating penchant for automatically and forcibly converting my perfectly valid ‘onclick’ attributes to a perfectly invalid ‘onClick’ attributes. As far as I can tell, any time a valid onclick is opened in Dreamweaver, it re-parses the page with uppercase ‘C’s in the onclicks. I’ve searched for settings or preferences to disable it, but to no avail.
Of course, technically, good ‘unobtrusive JavaScript’ practice would dictate that I shouldn’t be using ‘onclick’ inside my XHTML anyway. No argument. We’re not writing any new ones into the site, but it’s going to take a gradual process to refit some of our older systems. In the meantime, I’m getting ‘real cranky-like’ having to do find & replaces on ‘onClick’ every time I fix a tiny typo in a page — not to mention the disharmony and accusations that were unleashed when we believed we harbored a uppercase evil-doer amongst our ranks.
My Solution
I briefly considered picking my way through Dreamweaver’s folder …
SEM Expert Seeks Apprentice
It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog… my apologies to all who have expected more. Poor health and poor timing have conspired against me.
So a little quick news will have to do for today:
- I Will Be at SES (Search Engine Strategies) in San Jose… but only on Monday August 8. Actually I’ll be there on Sunday too, and I’m not flying home until Tuesday morning, but if you want to see me in person, I’ll be speaking in the Search Term Research and Search APIs sessions on Monday… then look for me wherever free drinks are being served.
- Jupiter Media has sold the SES show, Clickz, and Search Engine Watch. Comments from Alan Meckler explain it all. As long as Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman are still putting the SES conferences together, then the shows will still be good, and this transaction is a non-event for most folks in SEM.
- Google is changing the rules on Adwords a bit - basically, if you want to spend enough, your ads won’t get turned off even if they aren’t getting clicked. Chris Sherman explains it better than Google did, with good background info. Exactly the sort of thing I …
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