More Spam Protection

I have, once again, modified the spam protection for this blog. Akismet was letting an unpleasant amount of spam through. Not a lot, but enough to force me to SSH to the server to clean it up every week or so.

All I’ve done this time is layering a simple not-real-people weeder on top of Akismet. There’s now an extra form field in the comment form, but one that is hidden from you folks via CSS.

The idea is that only a spambot would fill out the field (craftily labeled “email”). I’ve added code on the server to flag any comment submitted with the fake field filled out as spam. Assuming everyone uses CSS-capable browsers, only spambots should fill it out.

The real test will be how many spambots do fill it out. All of them seem to fill out the real email field, so I’m pretty optimistic. It’s not hard to imagine that some of them would have half-decent CSS implementations, though, and be able to detect that the field is hidden, in which case I may be forced into a Javascript-based solution.