Spam stinks
Spam drives me nuts. It should be obvious since I wrote a spam filter to scratch my personal itch against spammers, but they are getting more and more agressive. Apparently they are now targeting FogBugz (the bug tracking system we use) now as well.
Why Fogbugz?
The obvious question is why bother targeting it at all? Well, it is because Fogbugz does nothing to prevent it, and in fact has always prided itself on the fact that ANYONE can open a bug ticket. So, spammers are pounding it now. We have seen a little over 6,000 bug tickets in the past 5 days opened as posts on the site for FogBugz.
I have tracked these down to the point where I know the exact pattern of the bot they use to see if Fogbugz is present, but I can't do anything about it. So we implemented a Captcha system to sit in front of Fogbugz for the time being. It is probably not a permanent solution, and I fully expect that spammers will figure it out at some point, but maybe the software will get it's act together by then and implement a reasonable anti spam measure.
Recaptcha?
So why did we use Recaptcha? Basically because it is free, but also because I like the fact that everyone who uses it is actually helping to read books while they use it. How's that? From their site:
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
It is a pretty good use of this technology from my perspective. It helps sites prevent spam, and it gives something back in the form of decent human OCR for old books. Take a look yourself for what they did. I am using the Dot Net API from their Google code site.
Older tickets
If you have an existing email ticket with the URL imbedded you can copy it and replace bugs with bugs2 and it should work just fine. Or you can just visit the bug tracking site and fill out the form directly using the information from the email.
This is a pain, but it is necessary for a while. I take bug tickets seriously. Every single ticket is summarized and sent to my cell phone as an SMS message when it is created. Yes, this means I have been flooded with spam to my cell phone over the past few days! This is a good example of spammers costing people money, time, energy, effort, etc. I better stop right there before I start on my rant about spammers and bots needing to be hunted down like rabid dogs (oops, did it anyway).
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