Spammers must die.

Glad you like my tip.

However you have a few bugs.

1. You can select both yes and no for your are you a spammer question.
2. If you say that you are a spam your error message reads

Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

Your comment has been posted.

Which contradicts itself.

And if you can see this, I've not broken anything :-)

Glad you like my tip.

However you have a few bugs.

1. You can select both yes and no for your are you a spammer question.
2. If you say that you are a spam your error message reads

Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

Your comment has been posted.

Which contradicts itself.

Oh and you have another bug where if you say no to are you a spammer it fails. I think you have your boolean logic the wrong way round.

Oh and can you delete that first comment, I was just testing your error message.

Oh and you might want to change your comment scrip name from mt-comments.cgi to mt-anythingelse.cgi as it makes the spammers life harder too.

Only I did break it. Hopefully it's fixed now.

Yep It's fixed.

No it's not, still broken.

Actually I stand corrected. It's half fixed.

Your error message on "Are you a spammer - Yes" is still confusing.

Ah, the perils of doing development on a live system :-) I decided not to confuse people with strange comments to old posts, and so wrote the explanation post first so I could test on that. Only I'd made a stupid error in the HTML form, so with my first comment already knew that the non-spammer bit was broken, and that the I'm-a-spammer bit gave me a confusing error message. Most of it now fixed, although I need to understand a bit more about what I'm hacking to fix the I'm-a-spammer message...

And Adrian, MT-Bayesian had decided that half your comments were spam, which is why they've suddenly appeared.

Adrian.

p.s. I've not been talking to myself, Mr. Sevitz is just continuing his campaign to steal my name ;-)

See this is why I don't use black lists. They just don't work accurately enough.

And then, of course, MT-Bayesian thought my last comment was spam. This is to test whether the I'm-a-spammer error page isn't as confusing (although it's rather basic).

It also seems that the comment spammers aren't as clueless as I'd assumed, as one spam comment has come in since I added this feature...

You'll still get spam, but I've gone from 3 a day with 300 on the odd days to 5 a week.

Removing the default answer in the "Are you a spammer" bit seems to have helped - there were two spam comments which just copied the defaults over from the comments page and got through, but since I removed the default selection of "No" there've been 16 attempts but none successfully (although the 16 may include retries because things weren't successful).

I'll see how things go, and the next step will probably be script name as you suggested, and also checking for a referrer URL - the spammers I've noticed don't seem to provide one, although that would be pretty easy to get round.

Just got my first spam since removing the default option for the "Are you a spammer". All my work circumvented because they used GET rather than POST...

And now the first POST comments get straight past my new scheme, I'm guessing 'bakecookie' isn't the best form field to look for :-)

Well, five or six spams through this morning. Time to extend things to the referrer url too methinks.