No more spam for PalDev
One of the most annoying things about using Community Server that its not come with anit-spam forms. Blogs,media, registration forms and other public forms are exposed to spam bots.
Community server have a spam scoring utility to mark spam posts regarding several factors such as the number of links in the post, the number of posts from certain IP address… and many others. In my opinion and from my experince with PalDev site –whihc uses community server 2008.5 express- this sucks and does not work well.
The most simple, common, and trusted way to prevent webform spam is using Captcha. Captcha is a pattern and the majority of the Internet sites nowadays is using captcha challenges to prevent spam bots fro flooding sites with endless submits.
CAPTCHA, stands for (C)ompletely (A)utomated (P)ublic (T)uring test to tell (C)omputers and (H)umans (A)part.
Anyway from day one when I setup PalDev site I said that I really need to implement Captcha and as usual – for lazy busy people- this task is delayed day after day. PalDev site have a many spam users registered, many spam comments on the blogs and too many spam comments in the media gallery. Then my email account receive tons of comment auditing alerts notifying that new comments arrived to my poor blog so I decided to stop complaining about and get the work done.
Don’t underestimate captcha its a great invention. Google acquires reCaptcha for 500$-700$ million deal last week.
I picked my favorite captcha control implemented by Jeff Atwood –you can find it here at codeproject- and makes some tiny tweaks. Then I started modifying the community server forms: the registration from, the media gallery post from, and I ended up modifying all the 16 blogs posting forms … ooof the community server ships with 16 blog theme.
Finally I can say PalDev is spam free – almost i still need to delete all those spam comments,users.
I will publish all the captcha enabled forms, the captcha modified source hope it helps somebody.