Bellerophon symbol, variation 7 jonath.co.uk
Monday 25th Jun 2007 20:22:49
War against the spam bots
Today I've added another layer of prevention against the spam bots. Occasionally these things will leave strange comments on my web-site, comments that appear to be adverts for various pharmaceuticals. The comments page now features a randomly generated image containing numbers and letters. In order to enter a comment, one must now enter those numbers/letters into the field provided. That should sort 'em out.

Comments received:

  • Name: Austria Tom
  • IP address: 62.178.247.167
  • Date/time: Tuesday 26th June 2007 22:14:19
  • Comment: Hi Jonathan. Wooh I enjoyed the dramatic suitcase incident blog entry, a fine piece of writing though I do hope you've both recovered. Did A****** miraculously sleep through it?
    I need to know: did you ever find out what that weird chimney thing was? (Maybe I missed it). Looks & sounds like some sort of kiln to me is that what you concluded? Or are you sticking with route to the Netherworld?
    Oh and I've always wondered how/why those scrambled letter things work. Now I get it.
    Sam, Tom and I are all on facebook. Tempted?
  • Name: jonath
  • IP address: 192.168.0.1
  • Date/time: Wednesday 27th June 2007 08:26:21
  • Comment: Hello there, Austria Tom. Been a while since I've heard from you. Yes - A****** slept through the scary suitcase incident. The weird chimney thing - I've still no idea. It was located amidst undulating vineyards, so it's all a bit weird. It is an area famous for its underground tunnels and what-not though. Hmmmmm. So yeah . . . route to the netherworld, definitely. Lucy mentioned Facebook to me, but I've not had a chance to check this thing out. Sounds a bit like MySpace to me. I have no need of MySpace, so I'm hoping Facebook is substantially different. The scrambled things are fairly simple in concept (although perhaps not so in implementation): it is very easy for a human to read the characters contained in the image, but not so easy for a computer to do the same. This means computer programs hoping to dump silly messages on my web-site will hit a major stumbling block, unless they can use some kind of clever optical character recognition thingy, which seems unlikely.

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