Thursday, July 07, 2005 11:16 PM
It's just unbelievable to me how much feedback spam I get. I know that this blog is far, far from high-traffic, yet I get 10-12 gambling-related feedback spams each day. I thought I'd jump on the CAPTCHA bandwagon and make it a bit harder to post feedback, but two things went wrong. First of all, the control I tried to pop in there just didn't work all that well. When I tested it, I could post comments without entering anything -- it only validated if something was entered. I was told though, that some people didn't see any image there, yet got an error when trying to post. It turned out to be a moot point though. It's not spam from people posting feedback anyway -- it's all trackback-based. Some "clever" spammers out there have figured out how trackbacks work and just send their spams to blogs that way. No CAPTCHA is going to do a thing about that. This put me in the fun position of deleting each of them every night or two. Unfortunately, .Text makes this very tedious with each deletion requiring three clicks (and no multi-select). I have the source code and I'm sure I could make it easier, but I haven't had time to get into it lately. What a pain!
So for now, I'm just hitting the .Text database with a DELETE statement:
delete from BLOG_CONTENT
where PostType = 4 and
Text like '%Poker%' or
Text like '%Texas%' or
Text like '%casino%' or
Text like '%Pills%'
This actually does the trick pretty well! It's oh so much faster than deleting each one. The BLOG_CONTENT table holds all blog entries, articles, feedback, and trackbacks. The PostType identities what type of entry the row is (4 is for trackback), then the Text field contains the body. A quick look at the schema can be found here. Since I am using Access instead of SQL Server I couldn't just remote connect with Enterprise Manager and am forced to use my hosting service's interface. This is another prime candidate for an addition to the .Text base code. I'll get to it one of these days!