Defeat comment spam? Yes we can!

26 December 2008 · Estimated reading time: 1 minutes

Thanks, but I’m not looking for a Russian bride and somehow I doubt yours is really a “trusted pharmacy.”

Comment spam is a scourge, as we all know.

I don't claim to be an expert on these things, but I have stumbled on a set of techniques that have been 100% accurate for preventing comment spam on this blog. And, no, it's not security through obscurity, smart ass.

I log every comment form submission, spam or not. Since I implemented my system a month ago, I have had 189 submissions. Of those, 11 were legitimate comments. The rest were spam.

All of the legitimate comments were published immediately. None of the spam comments were published. Not bad, eh?

As promised, the following slides explain in some detail the system I've implemented. I welcome your comments on these techniques below.

Defeating Comment Spam

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: spam comment)

About the author

In this photo, Andrew wears a Jeep baseball cap and sunglasses. The sky is bright blue behind him and his long, white beard is backlit by the sun. Andrew Hedges is an educator and technologist based in Portland, Oregon. A professional web developer since 1998, Andrew is the Cofounder of and COO for Assistiv Labs, a web accessibility testing platform. Prior to Assistiv Labs, Andrew provided engineering leadership to Disney, Apple, and Zapier.

During the Summer of 2019, Andrew founded The Collab Lab, a nonprofit that provides remote, collaborative project practice for early career web developers. The program brings code school graduates and self-taught career switchers together with working web developers to work on software projects using agile practices used by professional software teams.

Outside of work, Andrew publishes books with his dad via Road’s End Press and produces The Slant and Go, a podcast about the National Football League.

Prior to his career in web development, Andrew worked in higher education administration, coordinating training programs for university staff. He holds a Masters of Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1995, Andrew wrote his terminal paper for that degree on the potential effects of computer-mediated communication on college student identity development.