My addy is in the usual category up top. Write me a “hello, I’m not a robot!’ if you’re waiting forever for that confirmation letter. The letter from you must precede it.
Today I blitzed some 28 plus spammer-origin applicants that popped up within a few hours, and the list is getting a little long to sort for people from spamopolis dot com. I’m sure some of you who can read but not yet comment are people I’d like to hear from, but the membership process has to be completed to allow comments, and that involves your writing to me. ‘Kay?
CJ, I don’t know, but here’s my take on the spam situation. First, your email addresses are probably memorized by many spam sources, so that mecheita has left the barn. The only thing you’re fighting now is additional spam bots and low-paid humans.
The simplest thing is to ask people to send their I’m-a-human message to a Yahoo or Google address, whose anti-spam filters are very good.
Bots might, but I doubt it, look for a link with “contact” in it. I expect they crawl all pages (piratically ignoring norobots.txt) looking for addy@domain.name anywhere. They’ll probably understand addy(at)domain(point)name and similar simple circumlocutions.
I think they are probably skimming for what they can get easily, so they would tend to be confused by things that humans would easily overlook, such as:
Just send a message showing you’re human to addy–with the usual whirlpool, “at a rate of” symbol–to domain US-decimal (not a comma) name.
Basically, toss enough English-speaker-filterable junk at the spam bot so it’s probably not worth the spammer’s trouble to write the code to make a computer understand what you’ve written, and to confuse any non-fluent English speakers–but won’t confuse too many real users. After all, reading your books requires a pretty good knowledge of English; well, except translations.
Another technique if you’re concerned with rejecting humans with so-so English skills is to just change message addresses frequently, such as requiring a message to month-number four-digit-year, like 112017@domain.name — then kill off addresses as they get spammy.
I wrote a longer message about this, but it got eaten. Not worth digging out: my best advice is to have a user send a message to a Yahoo or Google address and let their excellent spam filters do the work for you.
Spam bots are probably crawling every page they can get to, so I doubt having addresses en clair one page down helps much. It’s a choice between the business desire to have addresses easy to access, and saving spam-sorting time by obscuring the addresses somewhat or splitting them across two pages.
Testing to see if I can comment after my pw reset.
You are coming through just fine!
☆*~ﾟ⌒(‘-‘*)⌒ﾟ~*☆
Yay
Hi Sweetbo! Nice to see you back here!
I’ve been lurking via Goodreads when I have time, but it’s been sporadic. Everything looks a bit different and of course I forgot my pw somewhere along the way. 🙂
Blegh! Cannot stand the spamming bots!
I used to have to spend a good ten minutes a day clearing spam; since I went over to this system, where you must write and prove you’re a people, the count is zero bots and puppy salesmen.