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2023-07-06T16:02:11Z
Note: This blog post is regarding past stuff that did exist, but not anymore as of today.
When my website had a place for visitors to submit questions, ideas, and feedback (collectively called "submissions"), I received spam.
For my case, my spam filter was pretty easy: If it has an email address or URL, it gets redirected into a file containing spam submissions. This works because most legitimate submissions do not contain either email addresses or URLs.
I made my spam filter up on the spot by finding something that's common between most spam messages. The answer was email addresses and URLs.
I then implemented an email address and URL search in my submissions code, then redirected all the garbage into another file just for the garbage.
The spam filter that I made was pretty simple (unless you count trying to parse email addresses and URLs), consisting of some regex and extra code for writing spam to another place.
(By the way, I didn't feel like referring back to the commit history. I remember this quite well that it needs no referring back to commit history.)
Now it's 2023, and I look back at the spam submissions I've still got. And it's full of business bullshit... sent to a personal website with zero business incentives.
Most of the things were submitted to questions and feedback (regarding my YouTube videos), which makes me suspect that most things that sent spam to me is only trying in specific and common paths like `/questions/` or `/feedback/`.
Tangently related, but I did a thing to my contact page: Instead of it being at `/contact/`, I moved it to another path. This is to attempt to prevent stupid crawlers from stupidly stumbling upon my email.
Um... that's it?