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

Well, I decided to start this topic after realizing that us, Adobe / CF developers kinda know each other from other web blogs, twitter, messenger etc, but sometimes don't know much more than that.

So for the three many people who read my blog, I decided to talk a little bit about me, and would like to encourage all of you (thee guys) to do the same, and link to this post, so I can keep track.

It shouldn't be like the "about me" section, but more of a "about me now".

So let's start:

Current work: EU Commission;

Team size: 4 here (plus the hundred others in the other buildings)

Main Technologies used: ColdFusion MX 7 and Oracle;

Projects Mainly internal apps involving a massive CMS, resource management, Action Management and Business Objects;

Current Studies JQuery, BO

Next Studies Maybe AIR...

Current Hobbies Electronics as usual

What will happen next? Will probably return to UK (as soon as I find a cool job)

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)

If you're one of that bloggers who love to post everything about you life such as address, naked personal pictures etc, you better take care, as this video shows as good example of what can happen.

And following Andy's Post I'm also "naked"

For those who don't know why we're showing our "<body>", that's basically an event to promote Web Standards.

So, take your <style> off and be free today!

After testing myself to know which Super Hero personality I have, I got this:

Your results:
You are Iron Man

Iron Man 85% Green Lantern 70% Superman 60% Spider-Man 50% Catwoman 45% The Flash 45% Robin 40% Supergirl 40% Batman 40% Wonder Woman 35% Hulk 20%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Hope you're not catwoman! Show me your results...

We're gonna have some drinks together tonight. If you wanna join us for a whole bunch few drinks, just pop in.

Directions

Might be a very old one, but I just thought some people may want to see it again.

So, some guys managed to find another Adobe Easter Egg.

This time not for ColdFusion, but for Fireworks 8.

Basically on PC(don't know if it works on MAC) you go to Fireworks 8, click on help and then about.

It'll show the developers names. Just ctrl+click the number 8 on the Fireworks 8 logo, and you'll see some strange animals like this:

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

Just to let you know/see my new face for blogCFC.

Thanks do Andy Jarrett for the help given. It's a pain in the ar*e to apply a template on blogCFC for the first time.