Spammers

The shout box on this page shows as the last entry (at the time of this post) as being a notice that I have worked on the spam problem.

I made a change to the program to record rejected messages. It is very easy to identify spam. When I reject a shout message I write the raw data to a file. It looks like Russian spammers found the shout box through a Google search and added it to their list. I’ve been getting about 100 spam messages a day, all for pharmaceuticals, and not one made it through the filter.

An interesting side effect of all this spam is that no one in their right mind would use the shout box because it would fill up with spam in minutes.

Yet the shout box is a good idea and I like it. Perhaps I will make a spam proof one that is easy to add to a web page and release the source.