hi all. the recent move/rename of the comments script did very little to drop the spam levels. I think we lost the very stupid spammers last time we moved, so we only have spammers who are onto that ploy now.
So I've come up with another one. You know how you have to put something in either the email or web address to comment? (Well, so long as you have annonymous commenting turned off).
I was thinking we could add another special, stonesoup-required field. Because this would be a non-standard requirement, spammers who use MT spam robots would either:
a) be blocked, or
b) have to edit their robots.
Because stonesoup will have a unique required field, they'll have to do special work to spam us in particular. Not much, but I think it'll be enough to trip up most of the morons throwing stuff at us at the moment.
I've tested it on clockworkfish, and it works better than I expected. If you don't put something in the validation field, it throws up a very similar message to the one if you don't put in an email or web address. (It doesn't work at the moment, cause we all share a comment script, so I turned it off again). But clockworkfish's comment forms have the required changes on them if you want to see.
I'm happy enough to spend an evening making the required changes to everyone's templates and rebuilding their sites, but I just wanted to check with everyone that they didn't mind:
a) the proposed solution, and
b) me rebuilding your sites.
I won't do anything precipitous till this weekend (though, so long as no one complains bitterly, I'll probably do it then, even if I don't have formal approval from each of you. The spam is just silly at the moment, and it's eating my blogging time).