Marti's blog

Despite adding a simple bot filter in this blog to block spammers (that's the easy and random question you can see below), I've recently found out that some still managed to get through! Have bots gotten smarter or are spammers posting their random garbage manually?

To find out, I actually logged the answers they were providing when posting (successfully or not). Turns out that many bots answer the antispam question randomly. As you would guess, the vast majority fail to post, but a few were lucky enough to get it right when the expected answer was a single digit. Solution: make more complex answer.

Speaking of spammers, I just got a spam SMS on my phone. The idiot who sent this mass-SMSing did something wrong because the SMS had a special keyword that was supposed to be replaced with a personalized value (something such as Congratulation #[RECIPIENT_NUMBER]...). Ahah!