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Smart Spam Filtering For Forums and Blogs?

phorm writes "While filtering for spam on email and other related mediums seems to be fairly productive, there is a growing issue with spam on forums, message-boards, blogs, and other such sites. In many cases, sites use prevention methods such as captchas or question-answer values to try and restrict input to human-only visitors. However, even with such safeguards — and especially with most forms of captcha being cracked fairly often these days — it seems that spammers are becoming an increasing nuisance in this regard. While searching for plugins or extensions to spamassassin etc I have had little luck finding anything not tied into the email framework. Google searches for PHP-based spam filtering tends to come up with mostly commercial and/or more email-related filters. Does anyone know of a good system for filtering spam in general messages? Preferably such a system would be FOSS, and something with a daemon component (accessible by port or socket) to offer quick response-times."

5 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Re:gmail by siyavash · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Do not allow registrations with gmail.com email addresses"

    That is one of the most stupid things I heard this year.

  2. Bad Idea by erlehmann · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As someone who once used text browsers, I can only advise everyone not to do this - it breaks accessibility at a fundamental level: I got banned from a forum once because they mislabeled fields.

    What however, works really great for comment spam is a simple question like "What is the name of Barack Obama ?".

  3. Re:the solution is here .. by AnyoneEB · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is not exactly a new proposal, and it has been shot down on Slashdot before. One major problem is that a lot of spam is through botnets and the spammers would not get charged the e-mail fees, people with zombied computers would. I suppose this would make people with zombied computers notice, but why would they agree to sign up for such a service in the first place? Also, tying e-mail to payment means that the payment is probably traceable to a real person, which a lot of people do not want.

    --
    Centralization breaks the internet.
  4. Re:Better than Askimet? by darkpixel2k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    read my sig

    That'll work, right up until the spam bots are told to ignore spampoison.com, or the person who is running the spam bots decides to put spampoison.com into his hosts file and point it to 127.0.0.1.

    Lame solution.

    --
    There's no place like ::1 (I've completed my transition to IPv6)
  5. Re:Better than Askimet? by mysidia · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The problem with that concept is spammers just have to "blacklist" spampoison.com. Or implement "spam filters" of their own to detect such site

    What would really be ideal would be thousands of poison domains, with high variability so smart spammers can't easily protect themselves and sanitize their lists, when they figure out what's going on...