Spambots Suck!

Today I had the misfortune of having to deal with a spambot on TrailCentral. What a pain in the ass! This bot caused two pain points for me today. One, I had to spend the little time I get to work on the site fixing the local bike shop rating form instead of working on fun, innovative stuff for rlog. The second pain point was that I got an email every time the bot left a bogus comment, which wouldn't be so bad except the email account is hooked up to my Blackberry, so my phone was constantly notifying me of new mail. God that was annoying!!!

In any case, the problem has been fixed. A couple years ago I started allowing anonymous comments on the local bike shop rating form, which is what the bot exploited today. It kept leaving anonymous comments... So, to fix it, I simply added a captcha image which is required to submit the form. I'm glad to say that I haven't gotten a single bot submission since I added captcha to the form! WhooHoo!

Though I have the fix in place there is still some cleanup to do. I have several hundred bogus ratings I need to backout, but that will need to wait for another day.

I leave you with a simple message.... "Spambots Suck!!!!"