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Ask HN: Favorite methods to block spam in your apps?

2 points by 3riverdev ↗ HN
Lately, http://www.theprobono.org/ has been absolutely slammed with spam project postings. They tend to consist of random characters for the username, random real-world locations, and typical spammy descriptions.

I just pushed a sanity check for the time between when the form is displayed and submitted, ensuring a reasonable amount for a human to fill it out. Beyond CAPTCHA and honeypots, any other ideas?

I've also been looking for a possible 3rd party service that could look at the project description and give a "likelihood of spam". Any thoughts?

Thanks!

3 comments

[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] thread
stevekemp
What format is the project-description in? Is it a paragraph, or more, of random HTML? If so you might enjoy the blogspam API:

http://blogspam.net/

It is used to blog forum/blog comments, but people have used it for protecting wikis from spam. (Disclaimer it is my pet-project.)

3riverdev
Thanks Steve, looks interesting. What exactly is its approach? Is it different from the alternatives (Akismet, etc)?

Feel free to take a peek at any of the new projects listed on http://www.theprobono.org. The project descriptions tend to be really similar to blog comment spam, so it shouldn't really be any different contextually.

NameNickHN
I used a time based token for all my forms. The token becomes invalid after an hour or so. Enough time for legitimate users to post their stuff but completely blocks automatic spam.