Oh, You Rascally Spammers

So I wrote an entry a while ago about icon design. It was linked from all over the place, starting with John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, and it gathered a lot of comments. Well, a lot of comments compared to the rest of the entries here.

Shortly after the comments died down, a curious thing started happening — I started getting occasional spam comments posted to that entry. This is despite the fact that I’ve custom-built my journal software, and that the API is different from WordPress or MovableType’s commenting systems.

Well, the trickle of spam comments turned into a flood, and thanks to Akismet, none of them have ever made it through to the actual entry. In fact, as of 21 November 2008, Akismet has blocked 454 spam comments for me, the vast majority on that entry.

But even though these comments aren’t getting through, and I never have to see them unless I want to (occasionally I’ll scroll through them for a laugh), it still bugs me that it’s happening at all.

So, to help mitigate this, I’ve changed the URL used for posting comments, and I’ve obfuscated the entire comment form so that it requires Javascript to display. The theory is that spammers don’t evaluate Javascript in their harvesters because there’s too much potential for infinite loops and whatnot, so they won’t see the form and won’t be able to comment.

In theory, anyway.

Oh, also, I’ve made AfterWords be able to evaluate macros within entries now, so the number of spams above is a live count. I really don’t have time to update this entry every day, even though that’s what it might look like I’m doing.