Freely accessible, ...
When you want to set up a guest book or forum, you most probably want to offer
a stage for as broad an audience as possible. To this end it is mandatory to
design access and operation to permit any visitor to go ahead without any ado.
It doesn't suffice to consider that your potential users access it with a broad
variety of browsers, but also that some may have physical afflictions that bar
them from normally using it. Here we are talking about the visually impaired of
all kinds.
Since they by definition see the screen insufficiently or not at all, they are
inevitably forced to use some other
auxiliary
means that pave the way to the World Wide Web for them. For the United
States
section
508 of the Rehabilitation Act that only mandates that
Federal agencies take the necessary steps, and for
the United Kingdom the Guidelines for the Design of Accessible Information and
Communication Technology Systems that takes care of these issues can in part be
applied to web sites as well.
Although these rules are meant for public information equipment, there's
nothing wrong with people designing web sites abiding by these rules where
applicable as well – and as far as information technology is concerned one can
achieve a lot without much effort.
On top of that a simple and easy-to-handle means of operation is required so
that any visitors don't leave in frustration. Anyone who has been driven away
like this won't return in the foreseeable future, plus other potential visitors
will stay away as well. It's like this: News and scuttlebutt get around, the
bad earlier and quicker than the good.
A well-designed navigation of your web site makes sure that a visitor likes
returning, especially when he found the information relevant to him.
... even for spammers!
Alas, an easy means of operation inevitably entails a problem: Some time later
spammers & co. find the means of communication you just put into service
and descend on it like vultures to try to unload their digital junk on your
site. You may have seen enough of it yourself: Obscene pictures here, offers of
some pills or another there, pretended financial investments yonder, all
brightened up by malicious code or links to fraudulent or otherwise dangerous
sites that could thoroughly foul up one's enjoyment. However, one cannot keep
an eye on it at all times, and every message that one puts into the digital
circular file seemingly entails at least two new ones. This is an eternal
cat-and-mouse game that brings up the question who is going to prevail:
The spammers or you.
You may very well get fed up with constantly cleaning up so that only two
options remain: Make life miserable for the spammers or throw in the towel.
Whereas the latter option isn't viable, because you want to provide your
visitors with a stage to exchange information and definitely wouldn't want to
show an already-established community the door, only the first option remains,
that is, put obstacles in the way of the spammer.
Insufficient protective measures
You may have found these as well to make life miserable for spammers: We are
talking about so-called
captchas
that are supposed to bar spammers from distributing their digital junk by means
of a more or less discernible representation of something. This ranges from
forum logins and guest books via registration forms to search forms and other
things since virtually everything is abused for distributing this kind of
rubbish.
In the meantime the graphical captchas have found company with plain text-based
captchas that present an arbitrary challenge in cleartext that is supposed to
easily be solved by a human, but presents a spam bot with an insurmountable
obstacle, usually some sort of math problem, etc. formulated as text.
However, the spammers have followed suit and adjusted to this kind of obstacle
– how easily captchas may be cracked is shown by
PWNtcha, and some
spammers don't even stop at
presenting
unwitting internet users with pornographic pictures or movies that may only
be viewed after solving a captcha – except that these captchas are coined to a
site the spammers have zeroed in on and so grift access to a secured area.
Under these circumstances you may wonder how to keep such a thing running while being bombarded with such rubbish from everywhere, especially when you don't have a team of moderators at your disposal that could continuously keep an eye on your forum, guest book, etc. to intervene if the need arises and block any user accounts that are abused. However, even their nerves could eventually be on edge.
Another problem arises when you prefer using
XHTML over the ”normal“ HTML to use
the full potential of the XHTML parser that mercilessly pinpoints every error
in your hypertext and so enforces a clean programming style, instead of
attempting to somehow interpret HTML tag soup, no matter how bug-ridden it may
be, as is the case here. You may merely wonder that your pages are displayed
completely differently on different browers (this doesn't even point
explicitly at the IE) and would be
astonished how a later version of your favorite browser is interpreting your
HTML tag soup.
Unfortunately many captchas make excessive use of
document.write(), thereby
precluding XHTML in the first place.
This calls for self-aid!
However, that's no reason to bury one's head in the sand and hope that the
problem is going to pass: It won't! However, with a bit of finesse you may get
the better of the spammers and to make spamming moot for them at least at your
site – plus you stay barrier-free and don't have to use any superfluous bells
and whistles!
The other advantage of this method is of course that you can define by yourself
when a message is recognized as spam, plus the number of methods enables you to
proactively improve your protective measures when you feel the spammers' breath
in your neck and they could eventually bypass your protective measures...