Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spambot Hunters: Josh Clark is doing some crazy fun stuff to counter comment spammers on Big Medium. I love it.
Big Medium counters this by covering its tracks, never using the same field names twice. Every time you visit the page, all of the field names change. The field names are MD5 hashes of the page’s slug name, its database creation date and a server secret. A semi-obfuscated timestamp is mashed with this field name, creating a 50-digit field name that changes every second.
If the correct combination of field names are not received, the form submission is discarded.
Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I admit…
