One of our clients was spammed earlier this week. In just a few hours, the website racked up thousands of user registrations. The client-side validations and anti-spamming measures proved to be too basic. We watch the horror as the user count rose to a few thousands more. We were forced to recommend to put the site under maintenance while we look for a solution.

reCaptcha
It may sound simplistic but implementing a clean & effective spam prevention tool like reCaptcha can be daunting. The avalanche of libraries that “simplifies” the implementation is overwhelming. Additionally, libraries are typically superfluous. They add too much cruft that complicates the implementation. Instead, we decided to implement our own from ground up. We followed the guidelines and conventions set by Google. Used their APIs and viola! We had a working solution in under a day.

Coming up with a quick fix was nerve-wracking and probably the closest thing I’ve ever done to a Hollywood-esque computer hacker movie.