Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil: Words You Don't Want To Learn

So today I got Crapflooded. Basically this is a tasty little tactic by a number of jerks akin to a DDOS attack. The jerk in question left over seven-hundred messages, some of which were spam (may be a different jerk) and some of which were just garbage: no URLs, just scraps of random words.

I've found some very useful sites on the subject, and have been thinking of some ways to cut back on the maintenance I do here. Heidi helpfully suggested MT-Close, which closes off entries to comments after a certain amount of time. It's an interesting idea, but though rare, I actually do get some valuable comments on my old entries, and don't want to cut that off.

What I am thinking of implementing is a plugin called SCode, which requires commentors to type some text from a generated image before their comment is accepted. This would definitely cut down on the spammers, but puts one more hurdle between myself and my readers.

So if you have a moment, could you tell me if this would be a bridge too far, or a minor imposition you'd be willing to accept as part of commenting? Please feel free to leave a message below, unless you're a spammer or a crapflooder. In which case, please die a horrible death at your earliest convenience.

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments:

NOTICE TO SPAMMERS, COMMENT ROBOTS, TRACKBACK SPAMMERS AND OTHER NON-HUMAN VISITORS: No comment or trackback left via a robot is ever welcome at Three Years of Hell. Your interference imposes significant costs upon me and my legitimate users. The owner, user or affiliate who advertises using non-human visitors and leaves a comment or trackback on this site therefore agrees to the following: (a) they will pay fifty cents (US$0.50) to Anthony Rickey (hereinafter, the "Host") for every spam trackback or comment processed through any blogs hosted on threeyearsofhell.com, morgrave.com or housevirgo.com, irrespective of whether that comment or trackback is actually posted on the publicly-accessible site, such fees to cover Host's costs of hosting and bandwidth, time in tending to your comment or trackback and costs of enforcement; (b) if such comment or trackback is published on the publicly-accessible site, an additional fee of one dollar (US$1.00) per day per URL included in the comment or trackback for every day the comment or trackback remains publicly available, such fee to represent the value of publicity and search-engine placement advantages.

Giving The Devil His Due

Comments

On the rare occasion that I do leave a comment, I wouldn't mind doing something like you suggest.

Posted by: sherry | December 4, 2004 3:25 PM

Likewise; I don't think typing a word in is that much of an imposition.

Posted by: Mike Russo | December 4, 2004 5:00 PM

If you're having this sort of issue, use Scode. Having to type in one word is just barely annoying. A comments page full of spam or crap posts is highly annoying. And if a site requires registration before posting, 99% of the time I just won't bother.

Posted by: markm | December 5, 2004 9:32 AM

Hi, Mark. Yeah, SCode is what I've just implemented, although I probably need a full site rebuild now so that it hits all the pages.

Posted by: A. Rickey | December 5, 2004 12:33 PM