Friday, December 31, 2004

Stopping Comment and Wiki Spam Scoble says he was hit and is asking for fix suggesstions. http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/12/30.html#a9060. My wiki has also been hit with spam, so in true wait-until-they-come-for-you-fashion, i was thinking about how to protect my wiki from virtual rape and pillage. I think using the image encoded text challenge would be my preferred solution. This is where the site shows you a distorted image of a text phrase and you type it back in as the challenge response. This way the site has a reasonable expectation that a human is actually making the edit. The images can be made more intricateover times as image parsing software becomes more sophisticated. It prevents dictionary style attacks. It is relatively easy for a human to perform. It preserves the ability for people to be anonymous or take on a different role, which i find valuable. The translation takes a chunk of time to perform, so even if the image translation could be automated, it may not scale well enough for the spammers. I don't think a login account is a solution because people will just create an account and then spam. It will take a while for the spammer's account to be shut down. I have seen this on several email lists. So i would put the image challenge on all edits, even if they have an account. Of course, given the drive to world wide slave labor, it might be profitable to hire people to manually spam. In that case a spam filter would be required. As I haven't found text only spam filters to be very accurate, i don't have a lot of hope for this approach. It might be hard to allow a free flow of ideas while filtering spam at the same time, because not all conversations are "safe." A hole in the plot is patent rights. I assume someone has patented the image text challenge. Hopefully they will give the rights to the world for the good of the net. And an easy to use library for generating the challenges would be a good touch as well. comment[] 9:29:42 AM

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