Deutsche VersionSpam fighting
I used to fight spam in comments here using a simple blacklist, which contained words that only spambots used and that were hence forbidden here. That worked pretty well. Now, however, I seem to be locked in some sort of epic struggle with a spambot who posts very similar posts, but has an astonishing variety of expressions at its disposal and thus manages to slip through again and again.
To stop this, I decided to write a more advanced, learning spam filter, similar to those used in E-mail clients. This isn’t as hard as it sounds, there are tutorials online, but to train this I need training data, i.e. actual and annoying spam.
Unlike normal messages, I don’t store Spam, so to get this I now deactivated my old spam filter completely. Since I don’t want lots of random crap to appear on this site, though, I have disabled display of new comments. They are stored in the database, but not shown anymore. How long this will take I don’t know (it is possible that the spam bot stops when it sees that none of its post appear anymore, believing the site to be broken), so please don’t be surprised if no new comments appear anymore!
By the way: I haven’t posted any new pictures here lately. That is because I plan to change that part of the site a lot. At the moment, you can find all my new railroad pictures only at http://zcochrane.deviantart.com/gallery/, though I plan to post them here as well once I’m done.
Written on May 24th, 2010 at 01:12 pm
