When I saw the subject lines:
| WordPress Email System | [Will Angley] Contact – Name: … |
| WordPress Email System | [Will Angley] Contact – Name: … |
in my inbox I was hopeful for a moment. Then I opened the messages and saw they were offering to submit ads in other sites’ contact forms for me.
This seemed like something that could backfire if I used it to advertise my personal blog; spamming my boss is not a career enhancing move. I passed.
My next reaction, after that, was “omg, this is exciting! I’m having a spam problem now! What cool technology can I use to fight it‽”
Then I remembered I was already using one; my contact form is protected by Akismet. I clicked around through the WordPress Admin until I found Akismet’s stats:
showing that I’ve been getting 75-90 messages a month, almost all blatant spam.
In hindsight I’m not surprised. Email spam is a hard problem, and contact form spam is in some ways harder; Akismet is doing really well here.
I know that big sites often need to do more to fight spam, using techniques like honeypot form fields (which look different to spam-writing robots than they do to humans), CAPTCHAs, and bot defense software that pokes at browsers to see if they look like they’re being used by people.
But willangley.org isn’t that big, and I like knowing I’m not breaking for readers who use content blockers, so I think I’ll leave things alone until I actually want to work on my contact form again 😛