“Live and Learn” — an expression I used to have fun with. But when it’s me who is doing the learning, things sometimes get complicated and reason deserts me.
Today it’s more about the Author’s Roost website, and this time it’s about “spam.”
Seems as though one of our members — only one! — began to receive spam (pornography) via a form we had mounted on our site to make it easy for members of the media to contact our members for quotes, stories, interviews, book reviews, etc.
We thought it was a wonderful idea, and we still do. But we apparently didn’t set up appropriate screening for incoming material. Once it had begun, try as we might, we couldn’t get the flow of obscene mail to stop. Needless to say, the member became first disconcerted, then angry.
We worked with our webmaster; we worked with our hosting provider; we worked ourselves up into a lather. And finally, our web developer, after suggesting a number of possible solutions (none of which worked effectively) suggested the only answer we really didn’t want to use – a “Captcha” system that cannot be penetrated by the “robots” that send out all the trash our poor client had been receiving.
Why didn’t we want to use “Captcha”? Because when someone from the media is looking for the kinds of information our members can provide, the media representative is usually up against very tight deadlines (I know, I spent nearly ten years in broadcasting and hosted one of the first audience-participation telephone talk shows broadcast in New York state — yes, I know, that was a lot of years ago!).
There are times when even the few extra seconds needed to copy the little letters and numbers from the “Captcha” screen into the verification block can become an obstacle to making contact at all — and we certainly don’t want that.
However — and this is a big one — since nothing else was working, here was the only practical solution. So we are implementing it, much against our own better judgment.
If you have any ideas, comment back, please! We can use all the help we can get.
