Total Pageviews

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Vindicated. For once. (A victory for the good guys)

This really has very little to do with the Neverending Necklace itself, but everything with my position as its webmaster (giggle).
I never had training on how to create and maintain a website, but I can be taught by trial and error. Over the years, I had the pleasures to explore the many possibilities as well as limitations within my software.

Really, I'm enjoying all the tools that are available and I make use of them where I find it applicable. But I don't like captchas in particular, so I leave them out of all my websites and hope for the best.

One of the more frustrating issues of course are the constant spammers who try to direct you to their questionable sites via form submissions. I promise I don't need any Viagra, male enhancement or the company of exotic girls. And I don't gamble, either.
But these spammers just don't get it.

On one of my sites is a form ("form A") that they particularly like to use, and a bulk of the submissions came from the same email address over and over, several times each and every day.

So here is what I did.

Suspecting that this one prolific spammer just bookmarks the pages with forms on them, I copied that page and linked that new version ("form B") to my site under a different file name and title, so visitors could still submit their legitimate info and never knew the difference.

It would have stopped the spam, but I wanted more.

I took the original version ("form A") off all the links from the site but kept it published. (That way, it still was a valid link in their bookmarks and could be used for their devious little attempt to get me to buy their crap.)

On "form A", I entered the email recipient using their own email. Now they not only got their own spam back but all the others as well.

It went on for about half a year. Today I got a notice as webmaster, that their email account was cancelled.

I'm ready to change the next form whenever they find it.

No comments:

Post a Comment