It’s too early to declare victory over blogspam utilzing a SWF form to pass a hidden variable to Perl via MTGotoAndComment’s Flash form. However, it’s been just about 24 hours since my initial deployment, and I’ve received no blogspam in the hundreds like usually happens in a 24 hour period.
I’m risking underestimating my enemy by assuming they will not be able to solve the SWF form riddle by Sunday evening, so without another gerund use, I’m curious what forms of deployment people think is best, specifically, how the SWF is written and loaded.
1. Create a AS2, Flash Player 7.0.53.0 version of MTGotoAndComment’s Flash form, and hand off with the necessarey Perl code (3 lines) to be added to lib/App/Comments.pm.
2. Same as above, except create an AS1, Flash Player 6.0.0.0 version.
3. Same as above, except create an AS1, Flash Player 6.0.79.0 version.
4. Create an AS2, Flash Player 7.0.53.0, FP 6.0.79.0 version, a 6.0.0.0 version, and a loader movie to detect version, and load as necessarey.
The reason I like #1 is I don’t get paid for this jazz, and it’s pure benevolence for my fellow man that I even spend time fighting off this evil. It’s quick, it works on all platforms & browsers (win, mac, linux, solaris, ie, safari, mozilla), and takes advantage of Flash Player 7’s speed of runtime, and speed to create content. If there is a bug found, it’s pretty quick for me to fix and re-deploy a new version.
The reason I like #2 is so I can target the most amount of users, and I don’t have to code any Flash; I just rig the cab file in the HTML to point to that version #, and utilize St
Jesse we implemented flash comments in September and have yet to recieve a piece of spam. Minus the 2 morons who actually took the time to type the comment in. Flash comments are definitely the way to go.
I wouldn’t consider this bragging, but my blogspammers are less conventional than yours. Mine hit my mt-comments.cgi file directly with their scripts, no keyboard required, so the SWF itself doesn’t prevent mine. The variable it hides from those blogspammers, though, is the key. My worry is if I don’t choose a proper deployment mechinism, it won’t be as useful to others with the same problem.
Her majesty claims that I should just do #2 for compatiability. I’m starting to agree.