Form Spam Blocked

As you may have noticed (all three of you regular readers), we do have a "Comments/Problem" form on our pages. It appears that that form was 'discovered' by an automated form filler program.

I've gotten two 'form spams' via that form. The message was full of random links and text; typical 'comment form' spam. The comment form is not very useful to the spammer, since the mail only goes to me, and the links are not displayed on any of the web pages here.

It was a good opportunity to try out a new spam-blocking technique for forms I found on RiaForge (an open-source community at www.riaforge.org ). A project called "CFFormProtect" does some clever things to ensure a form was filled out by a real person. It's ColdFusion-based (that's what I used to build the FileHurl site), and requires just a few lines of code added to the form page code. So I installed that this weekend.

Since I have only gotten two form spam messages here, it may be that I'll never know that it works -- although I added code there to email me if the automated guy tries again. But it was an interesting technique that will be useful as this place gets more popular and visible.