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Captcha's revisited

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Quiet here, again.. but probably due to too many things going on in life, so that's a good thing.

And right now you'll have to settle for just a quick administrative note: I've changed the CAPTCHA images a bit again and (hopefully) improved the code a little bit. Despite my earlier efforts I continue to get more and more comment spam. For some reason I don't want to force registration upon those who'd like to comment, but if the nonsense continues I see no alternative on the long run.

Top paying keywords?

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I found a page which claims to list the 100 top paying keywords, at least for their (Search7) network delivery. And guess what? It's all pills and gambling: "tramadol online", "buy tramadol", "cheap tramadol", "buy phentermine online", "black jack card game", "buy soma", "online gambling", "online casino", "online poker", "texas holdem".. and so on, and so on.

The on-line advertising world seems to miss out on Nigerian scams, mortgages and webcam teens, but other than that I spot an interesting correlation with popular topics in e-mail spam. One might wonder if these are sometimes the same people, although I doubt it: spam appeals to some because it is dirt cheap, compensating marginal conversion rates with bulk numbers. CPC rates of over $6 however indicate the opposite: strict targetting, to obtain optimal conversion rates. Perhaps some people run hybrid campaigns, but to me there seems to be a completely different business attitude between the two marketing efforts.

Aside from the fact that spam sucks, of course.

Login name restriction

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Up until now my site did not put any restrictions on the choice of a login name. All public references were either URL encoded or transformed to proper HTML entities, so it didn't really matter if there were any unusual characters.

However, a lot of spammers attempt to break Kiki's security by sending invalid data, aiming to abuse the registration process as a method of sending e-mail. Sorry lads, your attempts don't work and forgive me for my arrogance, they never will. However, I do end up with annoying zombie accounts in the database due to those silly spamming attempts:

/img/journal/20060803-spammers.png

And I don't like to be annoyed. So let it be known that as of now login names are restricted to letters, numbers, periods, dashes and underscores. And I've added the "random image code" Turing-ish CAPTCHA to registration, including an update to the look and feel of it (matching colours and a new font). Look at it's new-found prettiness:

/img/randomimage.php?token=example

Faster, Harder, Spammer

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If I were to sell goods that may (or may not) improve sexual experience, I would definitely try a different message than that of current day spammers. This example, taken from two similar messages from the same source, is just silly:

You crave to shoot like a film star... Do you wish to increase your volume by up to 500%?

I understand Viagra, because having an erection is an integral part of male sexuality. But what exactly is the purpose of increased ejaculation and how would anyone be interested spending money on it, other than producers of bukkake?

Spam must be cheaper than I figured, when senders can make a living from the low yields nonsense like this will generate.

© Copyright 1995-2009 Robert John Kaper. All rights reserved.

Tom has more friends but mine are prettier! (#1/1)