Spam is a problem, and there’s all kinds of it, but I’m mostly concerned with 3 kinds: email spam, comment spam, referrer spam.

Email spam is solved, thanks to SpamBayes.
Comment spam is close to solved, thanks to SpamKarma.

Which leaves us with referrer spam. I’ve started trying to implement the methods covered by Caveat Lector’s Spam posts. I’ve hosed up the site a little due to a bad .htaccess file, but things seem ok now.

I’ve noticed that it is certainly working as advertised, and all referral spam was 403ed on my most recent logs. (Sadly, a missed character killed my boards, but I think that’s fixed now.)

I often wonder if, knowing then what we knew now, could we prevent spam? Another question I often wondered is that if, knowing then what we know now, what would the “founding fathers” do differently? And I realize these are really just the same question: “How can you design a system that deals with the fact that human beings are corrupt?”