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The downside of public hint submissions

In general, I wouldn't change a thing about the way OS X Hints has worked out over the years -- I've learned a ton, had a ton of fun, and even managed to completely change my career. One of the first things I did right (through sheer luck, more than anything else) was to choose a content management system (Geeklog) that allowed for public story submissions. With the whole community participating, the hints collection has grown at a tremendous rate.

Lately, though, the downside of public submission queue has become apparent: spam submissions. As an example, here's a bit of what I saw in the queue this morning:

spam

There were well over 100 such entries, all of which were added between Friday morning and early Monday morning. Ugh. (Geeklog presently lacks any sort of captcha on story submissions, though I think there's one in the works for the next minor update.)

So instead of spending time reviewing, editing, and posting hints, I spent the first 10 or so minutes of the morning identifying all the spam entries and deleting them from the system. Clearly these are automated scripts at work, hoping to hit sites that use unmoderated submissions. They care not if a site is moderated, obviously, though it certainly puts me in a foul mood as I clean up their detritus. Sigh.

2 thoughts on “The downside of public hint submissions”

  1. Yep. I feel your pain. I spend at least a half hour each day deleting the same spammers over and over on a web site that I help to moderate. They must know that I am going to delete them, but they just persist. I persist as well. :)

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