

Ask HN: Favorite methods to block spam in your apps? - 3riverdev

Lately, http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theprobono.org&#x2F; has been absolutely slammed with spam project postings.  They tend to consist of random characters for the username, random real-world locations, and typical spammy descriptions.<p>I just pushed a sanity check for the time between when the form is displayed and submitted, ensuring a reasonable amount for a human to fill it out.  Beyond CAPTCHA and honeypots, any other ideas?<p>I&#x27;ve also been looking for a possible 3rd party service that could look at the project description and give a &quot;likelihood of spam&quot;.  Any thoughts?<p>Thanks!
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stevekemp
What format is the project-description in? Is it a paragraph, or more, of
random HTML? If so you might enjoy the blogspam API:

[http://blogspam.net/](http://blogspam.net/)

It is used to blog forum/blog comments, but people have used it for protecting
wikis from spam. (Disclaimer it is my pet-project.)

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3riverdev
Thanks Steve, looks interesting. What exactly is its approach? Is it different
from the alternatives (Akismet, etc)?

Feel free to take a peek at any of the new projects listed on
[http://www.theprobono.org](http://www.theprobono.org). The project
descriptions tend to be really similar to blog comment spam, so it shouldn't
really be any different contextually.

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NameNickHN
I used a time based token for all my forms. The token becomes invalid after an
hour or so. Enough time for legitimate users to post their stuff but
completely blocks automatic spam.

