I Hate Spammers!!

Well, I've been working really hard to get our Karas Family Blog page up and running. I've been trying to "upgrade" the website with things that I may implement on my other web site A Foolish Arrangement (for the band, The Cure). Some of these things are guestbooks, slide shows, being able to leave comments for pictures, and even voting on pictures. I'm trying to build them where they can be used across both sites (so I program it to be somewhat generic... which takes a little longer to do.).

Anyway, I had a guestbook on my Cure website that was free and through a third-party website. I decided it was time I build my own guestbook because I don't like having to depend on other people's code to run my site, not to mention they pop up stupid advertisements, etc.. So, I built my own guestbook and hand-entered all of the data from the old, third-party guestbook and put it into my new one (which took about 3 days to do!).

Long story short... now I'm getting at least 3 spam messages entered in per day. I HATE SPAMMERS!! Spammers have things called spiders or crawlers that go out and search the internet for guestbooks, message boards, blog comment areas, etc. and they have automated programs that can enter their spam in the fields and submit the forms. The more links to their websites that are out there on the web, the higher they are in the search rankings. Now I have to add some sort of a challenge question or something called CAPTCHA images to my guestbook. I'm sure you've all seen CAPTCHA images at some point when submitting a form. These are the words or numbers that are squiggled or distorted in some way and they ask you to enter what you see in the box. Well, this is done to determine that a human is in fact submitting the form. This way a spammer can't automatically submit the form with a program (and so it decreases the chances for spam being entered).

Doing all of this programming for my websites and doing some things I've never done before (like implementing CAPTCHA) has been kind of invigorating. I forgot how much I actually like to program and it gives me a little challenge which I need from time to time.

I hope I didn't bore you guys too much with the technical jargon... You'll have to check out all of the new things I've been adding to the site! Ta-ta for now...