DOM Scripting to deal with junk comments?
Posted on 03. Jan, 2007 by Daniel Aleksandersen in Blogging
If you have ever run a blog, or some kind of Website with a comment field, or field for user feedback, you will most probably have run into at least some level of automated, junk content or spam.
In acts of desperation more and more blog owners turn to DOM JavaScripting to deal with the problem. But this of course causes serious accessibility issues!
These techniques are based on stripping away required parts of the form and including them again with the help of DOM via JavaScripts.
The most clever of these types of anti-spam measures had simply removed all ids and name attributes from the XHTML document, and did not apply them before the user pressed submit. At which point the proper ids where applied and the form where submitted. A completely transparent solution to users with JavaScript turned on and a JS DOM compliant Web browsers. An automated robot would of course not submit the right data and be filtered out of the system. The problem however is that everyone without a JS DOM compliant Web browser, or JavaScript turned on would be dealt with the same way as a spammer.
I will not pretend that I have a better solution, but this is defenetly not a good one. It does deal with, I only take a guess with this one, all automated spam attacks. But it also excludes a whole lot of visitors from commenting and adding their views! Which is not very democratic, nor a good business-solution if the form was an order of some sort!
I am sorry, but you will all have to turn to alternate means of dealing with spam. DOM is not yet widely enough supported in Web browsers, it violates the accessibility-law and too many users have JavaScript disabled.
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