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In a coincidence, I deployed this exact measure to my ActivityPub server yesterday. There are these annoying bots that would submit spam into every HTML form th
by grishka 3y ago
In a coincidence, I deployed this exact measure to my ActivityPub server yesterday. There are these annoying bots that would submit spam into every HTML form they see, without even trying to load CSS or JS. Some are capable of recognizing simple captchas like the one I added as my initial attempt at fighting them, though it did, too, cut the spam significantly.
Here's the example of spam I kept getting: https://i.imgur.com/I1pTdSh.png https://i.imgur.com/I1pTdSh.png
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoI always think that fighting automated spam is a cat-and-mouse game, but I guess most spammers are still remaining unsophisticated and will still get defeated by simply using CSS to hide the a honeypot form field. Wow. Is it just because CSS/JS consume too much CPU and they want their spamming to run as fast as possible and don't care if they get a bunch of false negatives?
- grishka 3y agoFrom how I subjectively see it, 5% of effort gets rid of 90% of spam. Of course, this would never catch any targeted attacks, but in the grand scheme of things, those are exceedingly rare. In other words, good luck keeping out the remaining 10% without significantly degrading the experience for the innocent majority of your users.