Pacific Tides
My name is Thomas Sturm and I'm a programmer, photographer and writer.

Now go outside and look at the sky.

The Five Second Rule

It seems that I've finally found a way to block comment spam on the site that actually works.

As it turns out, spammers use automated systems to stuff the comments box with their nasty spam messages and these automated messages need no time to write - they are instantaneous. So now if a user submits a new comment, I'm timing how long it took to compose the comment and if the comment took less than 5 seconds to compose, I automatically reject it.

And it works!!! I can't even tell you how happy this makes me, since the daily flood of the most vile, horrible message I had to wade through seriously diminished the fun in blogging.

But now I can finally concentrate on making this a better blog - and hopefully get some real comments again. (Hint! Hint!) ;-)

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