Take Revenge on Spam bots

30 April 2007 - By Sean Fishlock

A public relations disaster awaits you if your Internet discussion forum, blog, online form or survey is attacked by offensive electronic spam or automated website defacement.  Fortunately there are some really effective ways of protecting your all important online image ....

In the old days it was just the occasional annoying sales email from out of the blue.  These days companies have Internet servers spamming us on a daily basis.  But slowly the germ of automated Internet spam has been finding its way not just into our email mailboxes but onto our websites !

I can handle it when it is in my mailbox.  Personally though I've grown tired or seeing the sometimes offensive messages which promise to enlarge this and reduce that.  Having set up a some rules or register with a promising spam filtering service which I am currently beta testing, my own spam problem needn't bother anyone (although other people might still suffer spam nightmares).  Websites are becoming more and more interactive with blogs, online forms and discussion forums all commonplace.  When spam attacks sources we trust, such as an online form, it is much more difficult to detect when it reaches our mailbox.  And when it comes to a public forum or blog on an Internet website - well that is a different story.  It would be like someone defacing our office building with grafitti.  Absolutely not on.

Thankfully there are ways that you can add some obstacles for spammers to your website.  I'll let you in on some of the methods we sometimes use ...

Avoiding Email Spam

Firstly, to avoid email spam, try to never put email links on your website.  Doing this opens you up to having those email links added to one of those nasty lists which are used to send unsolicited mail.  Try to use an online form instead.  Our Freestyler Forms have built in spam prevention abilities, some of which are mentioned below.

Protecting Public Forums and Online Forms

Implementing a CAPTCHA (a system to tell computers and humans apart) can be an easy way to protect both online forms and also discussion forums.  It is an image that requires you to type them.  The image is usually distorted so that even the smartest computers with optical character recognition can't guess what it is.   This can be used in the registration process of discussion forums to prevent automated sign-ups.  



Unfortunately though, you need to be weigh up the benefits, as the same things that prevent computers from reading them make them mean that people who have disabilities such that they rely on screen readers can't either.  They are not always accessible.  A question bank or password (particularly for surveys) can be used as a more accessible alternative.

Preventing Offensive Posting

Another affliction of many public Internet forums and blogs is offensive posting.  Unfortunately this is not just the realm of spam-bots.

One way we prevent this is using a technique called stop words.  Stop words is basically a list of words (or phrases) that we simply won't tolerate being used.  Before the word reaches the public view, it is automatically censored for us.  Sometimes spammers use clever techniques to obscure the word but not the meaning.  An effective stop words system should contain a full list of these words.

A second way is to moderate posts.  That is - to check them before we publish them.  This is probably the most effective method, but requires a bit of time and effort.  Fortunately an effective moderation system will enable you to share the duty with others.  As they say, many hands make light work.  Our Freestyler website content management system has moderation built-in (also know as workflow).

We can help

Datalink are not only familiar with these technologies, we work with them every day, and you'll find them built in to our range of software products and Internet solutions.  We can also custom deploy them to protect your site against the most diligent of spammers and ensure that your next interactive project is virtually spam free.

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