Betatest: Beating formspam with brandnew SpamBeetle

18 January 2011

Brandnew formspamkiller is ready for Bètatesting.

Since a few years triptic has been acquainted with the guys of onlinespamfilter.nl. Onlinespamfilter.nl promises their clients to get rid of e-mail spam within 24-hours. The guys at onlinespamfilter.nl have built an ingenious filtering systeem that will recognise well over 99% of all spam. And it works! So when the developers at triptic were working on some of our clients’ weblogs, trying to get rid of form spam, we discussed this issue with Gerard and Jasper at onlinespamfilter.nl. We talked about using the powerful spamfilter combined with an API, in order to get rid of formspam in much the same way as getting rid of e-mailspam.

As you might know -when you’re a blogger for instance- that formspam can be a drag. Your blog makes it possible for people to post comments. That’s what makes your blog lively. Yeah! Sadly, spambots can also find their way to your commentbox. Result: you have to work your way through hundreds of irrelevant comments before you get to that one intelligent comment made by a designated reader. There is a “solution”. Of course! Just let readers type an unidentifiable series of letters, numbers and dollarsigns in a small box and all will be fine. <Not>.

So, the task before us seemed easy enough. Together we had to come up with someting clever. And we did! As a result you now can bèta-test our formspam killer. We lovingly call her SpamBeetle. SpamBeetle is available as a WordPress plugin. Little as she may be, she will beat the hell out of spam. Want to try it for your self? Send an e-mail to let us know that you want to be one of our béta-testers. We’ll send you al the information and API’s you need.