Doing Battle With an Army of Bots!

You might have noticed public comments are currently disabled, with a recpatcha error showing the following message: "ERROR for site owner: Invalid domain for site key". This is not by mistake, I've temporarily disabled recaptcha from working on this domain. It's a quick and dirty way to stop the form from submitting successfully.

Unfortunately, the comments were being spammed by Russian spam bots. They were able to bypass, or fool, Google's recaptcha, quite easily, and sometimes posted dozens of spam comments per day.

I tried fighting this by also adding a simple maths equation to the form for the commenter to solve. That worked for a few days, but the bots were quickly reprogrammed to solve this equation too. So, for now, and with not a lot of time on my hands, I've simply disabled the public comments.

There's other measures I can implement, but in the mean time, you can always sign up for an account, and post comments that way! The public comments will be back eventually, and when they are, I'll do a little write up on combating spam bots on my brand new developer focused website, Null Patch.