Like everywhere else, Wandering Thoughts (this blog) gets a certain amount of automated comment spam attempts. Over the years I've fiddled around with a variety of anti-spam precautions, although not all of them have worked out over time. It's been a long time since I've written anything about this, because one particular trick has been extremely effective ever since I introduced it.

That one trick is a honeypot text field in my 'write a comment' form. This field is normally hidden by CSS, and in any case the label for the field says not to put anything in it. However, for a very long time now, automated comment spam systems seem to operate by stuffing some text into every (text) form field that they find before they submit the form, which always trips over this. I log the form field's text out of curiosity; sometimes it's garbage and sometimes it's (probably) meaningful for the spam comment that the system is trying to submit.

Obviously this doesn't stop human-submitted spam, which I get a small amount of every so often. In general I don't expect anything I can reasonably do to stop humans who do the work themselves; we've seen this play out in email and I don't have any expectations that I can do better. It also probably wouldn't work if I was using a popular platform that had this as a general standard feature, because then it would be worth the time of the people writing automated comment spam systems to automatically recognize it and work around it.

Making comments on Wandering Thoughts also has an additional small obstacle in the way of automated comment spammers, which is that you must initially preview your comment before you can submit it (although you don't have to submit the comment that you previewed, you can edit it after the first preview). Based on a quick look at my server logs, I don't think this matters to the current automated comment spam systems that try things here, as they only appear to try submitting once. I consider requiring people to preview their comment before posting it to be a good idea in general, especially since Wandering Thoughts uses a custom wiki-syntax and a forced preview gives people some chance of noticing any mistakes.

(I think some amount of people trying to write comments here do miss this requirement and wind up not actually posting their comment in the end. Or maybe they decide not to after writing one version of it; server logs give me only so much information.)

In a world that is increasingly introducing various sorts of aggressive precautions against LLM crawlers, including 'proof of work' challenges, all of this may become increasingly irrelevant. This could go either way; either the automated comment spammers die off as more and more systems have protections that are too aggressive for them to deal with, or the automated systems become increasingly browser-based and sidestep my major precaution because they no longer 'see' the honeypot field.