An experiment in fighting spam on public forms using “proof of work”

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2024-10-22 10:30:03

Spam is everywhere. If you have an email account, a mailbox, a website with comments, a cellphone, a social media account, a public form, etc. We all know it, it is a plague.

Over the years, there have been multiple attempts to fight spam, with various degrees of success, some more effective than others, some with more side effects, some simple, some complex, some proprietary…

Online, one of the most successful approaches has been captchas. Just like spam, these little and annoying challenges are everywhere. I’m not a fan of captchas, for many reasons, but mainly because the experience for humans is often painful, they waste our time, and they make us work for free.

So, for public forms on my websites, I usually don’t use any sort of measure to fight spam. The experience for humans is straightforward, and later I deal with the spam myself.

It isn’t too much work, but these are also just several low traffic websites. Obviously, this doesn’t “scale”.