# Request for Spam-protection Feature

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/request-for-spam-protection-feature/67954>\
**Category:** Engines\
**Created:** [February 14, 2006, 3:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/request-for-spam-protection-feature/67954 "2006-02-14T15:13:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2006, 3:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/request-for-spam-protection-feature/67954/1 "2006-02-14T15:13:08Z")

</div>

Hello,  
I have a request that the user engine and the wiki engines should  
incorporate some sort of spam protection, ideally using images.

[http://rails-engines.org/](http://rails-engines.org/) is such a new site, and still today I fixed  
pages  
which were spammed and filled with junk.

## Cheers.

Surendra S.  
[http://ssinghi.kreeti.com](http://ssinghi.kreeti.com), [http://www.kreeti.com](http://www.kreeti.com)  
Read the latest news at: [http://news.kreeti.com](http://news.kreeti.com)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2006, 3:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/request-for-spam-protection-feature/67954/2 "2006-02-14T15:13:09Z")

</div>

The best way to get this kind of functionality would be to submit  
patches - I agree that it would certainly be useful, but I don’t have  
a lot of time to dedicate to this time of feature.

james

On 2/14/06, removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> [http://ssinghi.kreeti.com](http://ssinghi.kreeti.com), [http://www.kreeti.com](http://www.kreeti.com)  
> Read the latest news at: [http://news.kreeti.com](http://news.kreeti.com)
> 
> * * *
> 
> engine-users mailing list  
> removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid  
> [http://lists.rails-engines.org/listinfo.cgi/engine-users-rails-engines.org](http://lists.rails-engines.org/listinfo.cgi/engine-users-rails-engines.org)

–

- J \*  
~

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2006, 5:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/request-for-spam-protection-feature/67954/3 "2006-02-14T17:50:01Z")

</div>

On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 16:45:10 +0530,  
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote:

> I have a request that the user engine and the wiki engines should  
> incorporate some sort of spam protection, ideally using images.

You should know that CAPTCHAs, as they’re called, are controversial,  
because (a) they’re very unfriendly to the disabled, and (b) they’re  
actually easy to automate - assuming you can’t OCR them yourself, which  
is  
a bad assumption these days, you just put up a porn site, display any  
CAPTCHAs your spambots see to the end users, and let THEM figure it out  
for  
you.

Jay L.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2006, 6:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/request-for-spam-protection-feature/67954/4 "2006-02-14T18:44:48Z")

</div>

Hi,

Jay L. wrote:

> CAPTCHAs your spambots see to the end users, and let THEM figure it out for  
> you.

It’s not terribly difficult to parse domains out of posted URLs and  
check them against SURBL ([http://www.surbl.org](http://www.surbl.org).) I’ve written  
proof-of-concept code to do this in perl, there’s Net\_DNSBL for PHP - I  
can’t imagine it’s that difficult to port either of these to Ruby.

– Bob

PS: I used the following to extract the TLD recognition regexes from  
Mail::SpamAssassin. With a PCRE engine and a little adjustment (add  
‘(^.\*.)?’ at the front and ‘$’ at the back), the regexes are fairly  
portable.

#!/usr/bin/perl  
use strict;  
use Mail::SpamAssassin::Util::RegistrarBoundaries;

print “##### 4LD regex #####\n”  
.  
$Mail::SpamAssassin::Util::RegistrarBoundaries::FOUR\_LEVEL\_DOMAINS,“\n”;

print “##### 3LD regex #####\n”  
.  
$Mail::SpamAssassin::Util::RegistrarBoundaries::THREE\_LEVEL\_DOMAINS,“\n”;

print “##### 2LD regex #####\n”  
.  
$Mail::SpamAssassin::Util::RegistrarBoundaries::TWO\_LEVEL\_DOMAINS,“\n”;

print “##### TLD regex #####\n”  
. $Mail::SpamAssassin::Util::RegistrarBoundaries::VALID\_TLDS,“\n”;

* * *

I found a bit of Ruby code at  
[http://www.spampalforums.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5156](http://www.spampalforums.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5156) that queries  
SURBL. It looks like all that’s needed is decent packaging and text →   
URL → domain extraction (see above and  
[SURBL](http://www.surbl.org/implementation.html) for more info)

#!/usr/bin/ruby  
require ‘resolv’

dns = Resolv::DNS.new  
begin  
dns.getresources(“#{ARGV[0]}.sc.surbl.org”,  
Resolv::DNS::Resource::IN::A).collect do |r|  
print r.address  
# etc  
end  
rescue Resolv::ResolvError =\> e  
puts “not found - address ‘#{e.message}’ not in list, thus hopefully  
not spam”  
end