blake johnson

I’m getting to my breaking point with spam. My blog gets a couple dozen spam comments a week, and in the last week, my email box was averaging more than a hundred spam messages every couple days. I’ve decided that it is time to take action.

Starting today, commenters on this blog need to pass a reverse turing test (sometimes referred to as a CAPTCHA, or a Computer Administered Program to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). I suspect that the current method I’m using can be broken quite easily with modern OCR software, but I’ll be moving to a solution soon which the best OCR software cannot pass.

I’m also thinking about starting an open-source project to provide a similar solution for email. The idea is to move to a whitelist system, and senders who are not on the whitelist need to respond to a reverse turing test challenge. Such software is already available commercially for Outlook and Outlook Express, but I want to build a solution which can be invoked in procmail (similar to SpamAssassin) and which has a PHP or Perl web interface. I hope to get this off the ground within the next month.