Since I came back blogging, I've been noticing an enormous increase on my spam logs. And they generally focus on the comment form.

I was trying to analyse what was really going on, and found that the spammers are now much smarter then some months ago, when a simple captcha would stop them.

I don't know about all the versions, but the blogCFC I'm actually using is 5.51 (yeah, I've been extremely lazy busy on the last months to upgrade), and the captcha normally generates 2-3 characters, hence the number of spammers.

I then thought of making some changes to it, so it'd generate a bigger number of characters. On a second thought, I realized that it would be just a matter of time, for the bloody spammers to figure that out.

Looking for a possible solution, I found this very elegant plug-in developed by Jax.

It basically uses a service called "Project Honeypot".

A short description from their website:

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

Jax then had the excellent idea of not reinventing the wheel, but use the service, and create a nice plug-in to be used with BlogCFC.

It's known to work with version 5.9.001 upwards, but as I was still too lazy busy to upgrade, I decided to give it a shot, and it worked first time.

For the number of comments on his original post, I guess not many people know about this plug-in, so if like me, you're having problems with spam on your blog, try this plug-in and see what happens. The logging table seems very happy and productive right now.

Update:

The SpamStop's pod on the bottom right doesn't seem to be updating as it should, but that's fine, at least still have no spam comments

As some of you know, one of my hobbies is electronics with micro controller usage, and I happen to use an electronics forum a lot when I'm losing hair excessively.

One of the functionalities I really miss on this forum (vBulletin), was an option to be able to see the code posted in a bigger version, not by magnifying it, but upsizing the code box, so I didn't have too much scroll like this:

[More]

Well, I know it's been a real long time since my last post here (dating over a year...).

In fact I've been just involved in lots of other projects lazy and didn't really have time to update.

As some of you may know, I've been working for the EU Commission for over a year now, and for some reason, the firewall blocked my blog (note that I still didn't post pics from naked chicks or stuff), and I simply let it be. Till yesterday when I found out that my blog has been massively attacked by bloody spammers, and was fully packed with nasty URL's. Maybe this is the reason why it was blocked by the firewall in first instance.

I did a good clean-up on it, and now it should be OK.

There's some stuff I want to post here later, so stay tuned for some exciting stuff about the new ColdFusion version (codename Centaur)

Looks like some of the major bugs on version 1.3 have been fixed.

Check it out.

Looks like a research found that just 1% of the potential customers would buy the new Apple iPhone. The price (US$500/~£250) is a bit too high.

People are barely interested in buying one of this, but those who are, said they would pay from US$200 to US$299.

Source: ITWeek