Comment spammers and how to get rid of them

Spam, don't you just hate the stuff? The internet age means that the days of picking up a pile of junk mail from the doorstop every day are long gone.

Instead, companies are using the internet to bombard users with offers to buy xanax, cialis, phentermine, tramamol, viagra and all sorts of other drugs.

First it was email. Then it was Twitter. Now they've got hold of my web comments.

But how do you stop the stuff from wasting your precious time?

Stopping email spam

Charles Arthur, editor of Technology Guardian editor of Technology Guardian, wrote an article this week entitled 'Help! My email isn't full of useful stuff that I want to read!'.

He argues that email is an inefficient, time-wasting technology compared to Twitter or instant messaging because people can send huge amounts of information.

The latter technologies are much better because of their enforced brevity.

But whatever your view, email will remain crucial for stuff that you need to keep, especially if you carry out transactions on the web. So how do you stop the spam getting through.

It's true that email-filtering technology has improved and found that I haven't seen a spam email since I started using Gmail.

Of course, there are times when you are blocked from using Gmail and have to use the account provided by your ISP. What then? In that case, I've found it's just as simple to set up Gmail to 'read' that account too and have the spam problem disappear.

Twitter spam

This one is easy. Just stop following anyone who creates spam.

Web spam

This week I've been fairly busy at work so I've not been able to tinker with the website every day.

So imagine my horror when I realised that the site had been picked some spambot which had managed to post 1,000 comments with links to buy a whole pharmacy of drugs ranging from xanax, cialis, phentermine, tramamol and viagra.

Luckily, the Drupal community is really good for creating modules for all sorts of tasks, and CAPTCHA will hopefully prove to be a Godsend.

Once it's installed the settings allow you to select to choose from two methods of anti-spam protection: text and image.

Image is the type which is most commonly used by sites, and asks the user to prove they're human by typing in a string of letters contained in an image block - something machines aren't able to do easily.

The text method produces a random selection of words and asks the user to type in a word within that sentence - the thought being that spambots aren't able to translate instruction 'find the second word'.

Fingers crossed, that should stop them. That is, until they find another way around the system.