Spammers in Forums / Guestbooks

Wishful thinking...?

Just spent way too much time adding to a guestbook's code for a client. Usual thing, really, trying to keep the spammers at bay, blocking words & phrases. Two hours coding the basic g-book from scratch, two days coding to deal with the spammers. Wondered if I might not be better off writing out a paragraph that says something like :

"Welcome... any posts not deemed by the moderators to be 'on-topic' containing URL's will be deemed to be advertisments. Our advertising rates are US$1,000.00 per URL, and will be billed according to the information contained in the "Global WhoIs" for each URL posted here." Thank you, the Guestbook team."

In an ideal world....

if only you could track them down and force them to pay

Hi Viper_SB,

That's my point - if I have one - the WHOIS gives you a contact address. Admittedly it would probably be useless to do this, but if it was automated and built in to the source of the major Forum & Guestbook scripts?

Meantime, I'm going to write a script that first checks the message. If it contains a URL, the posting party will be redirected to get moderator permission to post the message. Consent is then either given or not, the message treated accordingly.

So many 'if onlys' in this game...

yep that's the way of the web