Rails state of the art for spam prevention

Question

What is the current state of the art in rails for preventing spam accounts? Captcha? Any good plugins, tutorials or suggestions?

Answer 1

Edit:

It appears BranBuster is dead (this was years ago). But I really like: https://github.com/matthutchinson/acts_as_textcaptcha

I'm a big fan of the rails plugin called "BrainBuster". It's a logic-based CAPTCHA which I find preferable over the "type these words" things, because it is annoying to decipher the words sometimes... It's simple to look at "What is 10 minus 3?" and come up with the answer. YMMV:

https://github.com/rsanheim/brain_buster

Answer 2

Use a library: You're (almost) always better off appropriating code from people who are better at the subdomain than you are. The Wordpress guys behind Akismet have forgotten more about blog spam than I know, and I was an email anti-spam researcher for a while. You might be interested in a Rails integration plugin for Akismet.

Defense in Diversity: Spam is a quirky problem, in that the more popular a countermeasure gets the worse it becomes. As such, particularly for low-profile sites, you can get disgustingly good results by coding simple one-off tripwires. I won't give you any code to copy/paste because it defeats the purpose of the excercize: having a countermeasure which is globally unique.

One simple example is having a hidden form element which starts as some randomized string, and which is set to a known good value by Javascript code. You then bounce anything which doesn't have the good value supplied. This blocks clients which don't implement Javascript, which includes the overwhelming majority of spam scripts. There are issues, of course, as some legitimate clients also block Javascript -- but realistically, if you're using Rails, I'm guessing you're sort of assuming cookies are on and Javascript works.

Answer 3

I also recommend ReCAPTCHA, both because it's a highly-reliable service you don't have to manage, and because it serves two common goods - the OCR tasks described by the ReCAPTCHA team, and the progress towards teaching people how captchas work, reducing abandonment rates.

Answer 4

There is a re-captcha plugin if you want to use captch to verifye that only human can register, or add content: http://ambethia.com/recaptcha/files/README_rdoc.html

Answer 5

Spam is fair. It doesn't care what you're running behind the scenes.

So by extension, the things that work well on Rails are the same things that work for PHP, ASPNET, etc. Take a look at Akismet and the various "karma" anti-bot tools there are about.

For some there are existing ruby ports but you might have to rewrite a few to task.

Answer 6

For account creation, you may want to use Captchas. I personally am not terribly fond of them and I don't think they are that effective. But if you use them, I strongly suggest you use a service instead of trying to whip up your own. Re-captcha comes to mind. Not sure if there are wrappers for Ruby or Rails, though.

To prevent spam content, however, I strongly suggest Defensio (disclaimer: I've worked there in the past). It uses state of the art spam filtering techniques like what's used for email, such as bayesian filtering. There are plugins for many blogging platforms, including Mephisto (made with Rails). The API is simple and you can look in a few places to get working examples of how to use it with Ruby.