Bots, Bots everywhere not a single defeatable..
Bots have created nuisance on the internet. They are everywhere. Some might be reading this post and would be frustrating trying to sell v*gra via comments on this page. But hey, I have captcha to defeat them. This alone is not sufficient.
I have hidden my personal email from the bots always. I never write my email id directly. Either I write it in a cryptic format or I upload an image containing my email ID. But even then I am getting about 10 spam messages a day. How? I don’t know how.
We are already living in a world of matrix. We cannot do anything but acknowledge the presence of bots annoyingly. Whatever we do to keep them away, bots are two steps ahead of us.
Well, I have done much blah-blah about bots, but WHAT ARE BOTS?
Bots are the automated software programs which crawl to internet to do things. What they do can be good such as Google bots which crawl the internet to create an index. But in this post I am mainly talking about the baddy bots. Bots which go from page to page filling forms, creating fake accounts, sending spam to every email id encountered and all other annoying things.
These bots are created by some programmers-gone-mad who try to sell cheap v*gra, c*sno services, etc. to world over by filling the the forms with the text promoting their product. If you want to see what bots look like 🙂 Just set up some blogging account somewhere and I am sure the spamming bots will visit your site earlier than google bots.
There are various kinds of bad Bots:
1. Email – Those which send annoying spam
2. Splogs – Setting fake blogs and then linking to each other to get high rankings on a search engine
3. Link spamming on comments – If you dont have captcha on your blog, it will be spammed
4. Even webstats bots – Yes, the webstats page of my website is spammed. The blogs again and again visit my site. So in ‘reffers’ section I just get to see bot’s website.
5. Wiki bots – The wikis are heaven for bots to promote thier products
6. Next version of bots: yummy ‘del.icio.us’ bots – Yes, I think next victim of bots could be social bookmarking site ‘http://del.icio.us’
So, what is the solution to bots. Simple add an image verification/captcha in each form on the webpage. Or better adding human verification by integrating captcha to the submit button itself. It means changing the web standards, so that each time a user clicks ‘submit’ button, he is required to see what is written in the accompanying image (this is called a captcha). The bots cant read so cant spam you. But it can only be effective until programmers write OCR software inside bots.
I think someday the AI of bots will advance so much that they won’t be indistinguishable from the human users. That day will see the fall the internet as we know it.
Good luck for the constant battle!!