Robert Accettura's Fun With Wordage » captcha

Email Image Protection

Robert — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 01:32:25 +0000

Many people think that making an image out of an email is a good way to protect it from being harvested by spam bots. It’s now possible to convert it from an image to email link via a Firefox extension. Guess what, an email harvester can do this just as well. What’s a better solution against email harvesters? Don’t put any trace of an email address online, use a form. Yes you could distort the image a bit to make it more difficult, but using a CAPTCHA as an email isn’t going to make you any friends. JavaScript can also be done, but no reason why it can’t be interpreted (though that may be more difficult in some cases, since a JS engine isn’t the easiest thing to work with, and implementing anything less can easily be defeated by throwing some extra JS in there. Some discussion on the Firefox Extension implementation can also be found on Gerv’s blog where he proposed the idea.

Jay Allen takes a break and the Internet Chokes

Robert — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 16:20:08 +0000

Jay Allen takes a break, and myself, and many others are being pounded by spammers. His last update seems to have been 2004-10-30 16:18:38+01:00. Since then, it’s been a nightmare. At least 50 since I went to bed last night (at 2:00 AM). Now at 10:00 (no morning classes, so I slept in until 9:00), I’m cleaning up from a few hours sleep.

There’s got to be a real solution to comment spam.

I’m still considering switching to WordPress since I know PHP rather well, and use a nice CAPTCHA system to protect the blog.

PHP Class to prevent automated signups

Robert — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 15:15:36 +0000

If anyone knows of a good PHP class (must be open source license) that will display one of those captcha images with text that must be entred to deter bots (like what Network Solutions does for whois), I’d greatly appreciate it.