Thought Distillery

All Spam must die.

I’ve been receiving way too much recently from this site’s contact form. In an effort to combat this unfortunate trend, I’ve added a couple of requirements to the form. However, instead of a boring and annoying CAPTCHA solution I instead opted to create a somewhat fun and annoying Vocabulary Quiz solution. "Vocabulary quiz?!" you may exclaim. Well, this one is not so serious. I pulled all the definitions from the somewhat humorous Foolish Dictionary which is freely available on Project Gutenberg. So go ahead and study up, then take a quiz or two. You can practice without sending me an email by simply leaving the message field blank. Of course if you are so inclined, by all means fill in the message and tell me what you think.

Ok, that is the visible part of the solution. Behind the scenes I utilize a simple yet effective thing called a nonce. All technical cryptography blather aside, a nonce is basically a single-use ticket. When you visit the contact form, a nonce is issued which is good for answering that specific quiz once and only once. Often, a spammer will submit their garbage to the same form over and over. Using nonces in this case forces spammers to go through the extra steps of requesting a new quiz, parsing out the definition and choices, looking up the correct answer, then submitting their garbage. I am hoping that at least for a while no one will be all that interested in jumping through so many hoops just to blast little old me.

P.S. If you are a pet lover interested in fighting web form SPAM, you may be interested in reading about CAT CAPTCHA!