Re: Beneficial site spamming framework

On 11-10-2012 22:18, Ashley Sheridan wrote:

I've been getting spam comments on my personal blog (runs on self-written PHP blog software). I'd like to test some methods I've devised to prevent or block it. Does anyone know of a very

lightweight

framework for simulating an automated "form fill-out" on a site? Something where you could just add some code to designate the site

for

the "attack" and then what fields you wanted to send? This should be a relatively simple task for PHP and curl, but I'm not really familiar with the headers and that part of the HTTP

conversation.

Yes, I know this is a risky question for a public list. Feel free to contact me privately if you think the answer shouldn't be in the archives of a public list. Likewise, if you can point me to a source

of

quickly absorbable research on the subject. I frankly don't know how

I'd

google such a thing. Paul -- Paul M. Foster http://noferblatz.com http://quillandmouse.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

To avoid having to create your own anti-spam system, I recommend Akismet, which weights posts allowing you to set a rejection threshold. The great thing is that it is constantly improving over time. I've recently looked into the more modern captcha systems. I personally can't stand the "standard" captcha of having to decipher what characters are present on a distorted image. The last few years I've noticed that more and more often I can't decipher what an image is supposed to say. And after a few tries of unsuccesful replying what the image says, I just give up. This seems to be a reverse-Turing-test by now. Computers being able to guess better than humans.

Anyway, I wrote my own captcha system. I've noticed that simple things like "what is the capital of the USA?" and then being able to choose "Hong-Kong, Washington or Rome" or a question like "Is water wet or dry?" work very very well. Just make up a bunch of these, and then randomly pick one to have people answer on your blog. It completely stopped registration spam on my forum. Simply because bots don't understand such questions. - Tul