A Perl script protects forums against spam

SPAM STOPPER

Article from Issue 71/2006
Author(s):

Spammers don’t just send email. They exploit discussion forums and blogs, posting pseudo-messages full of links to dupe search engines. A Perl script cleans up the mess.

My own small discussion forum on perlmeister. com has attracted too much attention from link spammers recently. These parasites of the Web target their bots at popular forum software tools such as phpBB or blog applications such as Wordpress, bombarding them with postings that contain very little aside from links to poker and sex pages. Spammers try to lure forum visitors into clicking on their sponsors’ websites, and they are trying to dupe the major search engines that rate the importance of a page based on the links pointing to it. Spanner in the Spambot’s Works What is known as comment spam [2] can be reduced by restricting postings to registered users. But this obstacle is also likely to frighten off legitimate users who have qualms about privacy issues. And moderating every posting before it appears on the website may keep the spammers out, but the effort required for these checks is immense – not to mention the unavoidable delays that hamstring any discussion.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Free Software Projects

    Free software covers such a diverse range of utilities, applications, and assorted projects that it is sometimes difficult to find the perfect tool. We pick the best of the bunch. This month we cover blogging – the latest buzz, the latest on the DPL elections, and more trouble at Debian.

  • Wiki Engines

    Wiki engines drive patient data stores, repositories for ideas or documentation, and treasure troves of knowledge of all kinds. In this review, we put six of these engines through their paces.

  • Usenet

    Before the web as we know it existed, Usenet performed the same tasks now done by web forums and social networks. Despite its declining popularity, Usenet is still employed to publish articles, sustain mailing lists, and even upload files.

  • Discourse Forum Framework

    The open source Discourse framework modernizes bulletin boards and online forums with live updates as you read, providing never-ending scrolling, community moderation capabilities, heuristic spam blocking, special layouts for mobile devices, and more.

  • Amavisd-new

    Sometimes the best time to stop bad mail is before it arrives. AmavisdNew is an Open Source interface for integrating spam and virus filtering with your mail server.

comments powered by Disqus