Today I found the following comment in my akismet spam folder:

xrumer ist die beste!!!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/—/thumb/—/—/XRumer—screenshot.gif/—XRumer—screenshot.gif*

;)

* link obfuscated

The link showed a screenshot of some software that tends to be a powerful spamming tool for forums/blogs/wikis/guestbooks/linklists/whatevers. Others report that it automates the complete workflow:

  1. register email accounts
  2. find forums etc. through search engines
  3. register forum/wiki/… accounts
  4. click the links in the activation mails
  5. post spam messages, pm other board users, overcoming captchas and other anti-spam techniques

Officially the package is sold as a “link building tool” and the vendor even declines calling it a SPAM tool, solely for the fact that it does not send emails. But in my opinion SPAM refers not only to emails but every unwanted advertisement.

I knew those software was around for a long time since forum spam is not a new problem. But this is the first time I heard a name and was able to find a website advertising for it. As with email spam, the visibility of such tools will further increase and so will the problem of spam in (web-)applications with user generated content.

The web took several years to evolve from bulletin boards (which in the meantime look a bit outmoded sometimes) to the current web 2.0 with social software. How long will it take until spammers manage to jump over?
Are there other free anti-spam services like Akismet (or libraries for local use) that could be integrated into any type of software? What advanced techniques do those services make use of? Honeypots? Bayesian filtering? The problem with email spam filtering has shown that each appraoch has it’s drawbacks and now best-for-all solution had been found so far.

Hint: If you do not have anti-spam technology in ANY ONE application that accepts user input you should think about integrating it NOW. Right after parsing and sanitizing the content.

Note: I am not affiliated with Akismet. It’s just the only one service I am aware of and it works well for my blogs. However I know and dislike that each comment is sent to their servers.

Update (19.03.): Today I read about defensio which seems to be a similar service as akismet, but maybe with a better UX.