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I can almost answer my own question here, I think the recent spammers have been real people, people with a horribly sad job, but still real people. According to IP addresses, nearly all from the same area in China, all using the same ISP, etc...
I could be wrong though, it could be bots running from that location, and I started to look at a few CAPTCHA and non-CAPTCHA spam blocking solutions. I'm more of a fan of the non image based stuff, like these:
Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots
Subkismet - The Cure For Comment Spam
but I also was interested in both of these, mostly because they have at least some purpose beyond just their CAPTCHA function...
reCAPTCHA
http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/
Overall, putting anything visible seems like a real annoyance to normal users, one extra step/click while posting... but it has been bouncing around in my head tonight anyway so I thought I'd see what you folks thought about the topic.
More...
View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds
I could be wrong though, it could be bots running from that location, and I started to look at a few CAPTCHA and non-CAPTCHA spam blocking solutions. I'm more of a fan of the non image based stuff, like these:
Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots
Subkismet - The Cure For Comment Spam
but I also was interested in both of these, mostly because they have at least some purpose beyond just their CAPTCHA function...
reCAPTCHA
http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/
Overall, putting anything visible seems like a real annoyance to normal users, one extra step/click while posting... but it has been bouncing around in my head tonight anyway so I thought I'd see what you folks thought about the topic.
More...
View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds