Clever Spam Reduction Technique

I discovered one of our client’s company blogs1 tonight because they mentioned they’d just upgraded to EditLive! 6. Reading through the backlog I discovered they’ve found a clever way to reduce the impact of form spam that I hadn’t come across before2 – only accept the submission if it uses multipart/form-encoding not just a plain post. Like most techniques it won’t work if everyone does it but it’s another interesting way to differentiate.

I do have to wonder why spam bots aren’t all just using an embedded browser these days though3 – there seems to be a huge number of ways that they get caught out needlessly.

Anyway, I noticed in their support history there’s a feature request I can solve for them easily via our plugin architecture. If someone could throw a squishy toy at me in the morning to add it to the list of LiveWorks! article ideas that’ be great4.

1 – note the first cool use of blogs – learning about your customers↩

2 – note the second cool use of blogs – learning interesting stuff that may or may not be useful in the future↩

3 – watch the comments for the third cool use of blogs – I'm sure someone will have additional insight on this↩

4 – note the fourth and most cool use of blogs – using the inherent delay as a reminder mechanism5↩

5 – also, footnotes are cool and I just haven't used them enough lately↩