How many pounds of illness can an ounce of prevention cure?

I bet it’s lots. Welcome to 2007. The year where spam has completely taken over the internet. Most admins will tell you that 90% of all email is now spam (not on my server though, thanks to spamhaus). On the web, spam is on the rise as well.

Where only in 2005 you could put up a web form without ill effect, in today’s world an unprotected form is an open invitation to spam zombies. Thanks to the badly designed Windows operating system, it will be a matter of hours before your comments area is flooded with spam, spam, spam, spam.

So you build defenses. Add a filter, use a community driven blocking system, add captchas, and generally put up barriers. Inconvenient to say the least, but we tend to accept it as the cost of doing business.

Yesterday I have used a piece of technology which puts up another barrier for zombies, but [in my opinion] not for real people. I load the comments form via an ajax call! This means it’s not in the page to begin with. And since zombies rely on automated spidering, they will never see the form anyway.

Of course, using ajax means excluding non-javascript browsers, but so be it. My site is full of ajax anyway. Another barrier in place, volume of spam currently back to zero. Score for the good guys.