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I don't need ringtones or insurance

I've mentioned before that I can't use captchas on my website because the server doesn't support PHP-based image generation. Yesterday I implemented a simple mini-captcha myself. If you want to post a comment now you need to change a radio button. Yeah, very simple. Nevertheless spam comments decreased by like 80% (from 10 - 12 per 24 hours to 2 in the last 24 hours).

But even with this new spam-blocker, two spam comments were posted. There are two possibilities for this. Either the spam scripts randomize input of unknown fields or the spammers detected that I changed my website. I'm going to discount the second possibility. My site is so unimportant that I doubt any spammer watches it. Especially since even the dumbest spammer must have realized by now that not a single spam comment ever made it through the moderation phase. This leaves the first option which is probably the real reason.

The second option is more interesting though. I'm going to assume that I'm a victim of blog spam not because of the huge advertising value of my website but because I fell prey to scripts that target the blogging software I'm using. The script probably picked up my site through a Google search for specific keywords that indicate the use of the blogging software.

I've never seen any of these spamming scripts but I think it would be cool if they notified spammers if a form changed since the last time they tried to post something. That way the spammer could check the page manually and eventually react to changes in the form. This could have happened if my website was important. One day I'm going to track down some of those spamming scripts and have a look at how they work.

Since I doubt that my website is specifically targeted I'm going to replace the radio button with a small text field if spam gets too bad again. That way I'll beat randomizing scripts.

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