ratcreature | spammers suck

A while back I vented here about the spammers that plague the guestbook of a (non-fannish) site I maintain. It uses a very simple, relatively common guestbook script. The script didn't have the function to disable URL linking, and at first I just removed the URL input field, which wasn't great, but seemed like a way to make it less attractive to spammers. But I quickly learned that obviously these people didn't use the "add guest" form, but somehow called the script directly with parameters. So I'm no Perl programmer, but I can read a simple script, an I changed the program to display an "You are spamming!" error each time someone called the script with an URL field input, after all regular visitors using the form on our page wouldn't ever see that, what with there being no URL field and all. That cut down the spam a bit (and in the logs I could see that if I hadn't changed it there would have been several entries with spam URLs a day), but these people are obviously stupid. They call the guestbook script now, and with the URL field disabled put html-links in the email and name fields, no matter that the html will be stripped away by the script. So now there were entries reading "great site. cheap viagra < cheap viagra >" and the like, I can just assume the "cheap viagra" parts in both name and email were links in the input. It's of no use for whatever site they are trying to "promote" and really why they expect any results from spamming penis enlargements, viagra and phone sex on the site of a small feminist radio project is a mystery anyway. I still had to delete spam every couple of days. So for now I have closed the guestbook, which isn't tragic as there were very few people using it for real feedback and comments anyway, but it's still annoying. Obviously guestbook scripts without advanced spam protection measures are not a viable option anymore. It's just infuriating how spammers reduce the easy usability of services for everyone else. Grr.