Database crunchin'
Just spent most of the day cleaning up a subscriber database in preparation for sending out a mass-email announcement.
The list started out with about 750 entries in it. By the time I was done dropping the spam and duplicate entries, it was down to a lean 270, give or take. Seems half the spambots that found the "subscribe to our mail list" form thought it was a guest book or regular comment form. Those were the easy ones to pull out (because no one has a name like "Great Site!").
The more sneaky bots actually used an actual name... except they used the same ones for the first and last fields and then didn't bother to make the fake e-mail address match (so you'd get Vernon Vernon with an e-mail address of robert@yahoo.com).
The really sneaky ones get creative with names. Best one I saw (with the attached e-mail address) was: Freeporn Williams (gay@sex.com)
So, yeah, that's mostly been my day. From Ambien to Zoloft.
Now to convince them to add some sort of filter to that darn form so this doesn't have to be done every time.
The list started out with about 750 entries in it. By the time I was done dropping the spam and duplicate entries, it was down to a lean 270, give or take. Seems half the spambots that found the "subscribe to our mail list" form thought it was a guest book or regular comment form. Those were the easy ones to pull out (because no one has a name like "Great Site!").
The more sneaky bots actually used an actual name... except they used the same ones for the first and last fields and then didn't bother to make the fake e-mail address match (so you'd get Vernon Vernon with an e-mail address of robert@yahoo.com).
The really sneaky ones get creative with names. Best one I saw (with the attached e-mail address) was: Freeporn Williams (gay@sex.com)
So, yeah, that's mostly been my day. From Ambien to Zoloft.
Now to convince them to add some sort of filter to that darn form so this doesn't have to be done every time.