First New ColdFusion Meetup Presentation

Last night, the newly reconstituted ColdFusion Meetup group had their first presentation. The frequency of future meetings hasn't yet been decided, but it sounds like they plan to have them at least once a month.

This presentation was titled "Attack of the Spam Bots" (about an hour) and was by Jake Munson. It was a good presentation overall and he showed some interesting approaches for fighting comment spam.

His approach emphasizes that the user should not be burdened with proving that they aren't a spammer, but that the program should bear that responsibility. His solution uses JavaScript, but will work without it.

This is due to one of my favorite aspects of his approach - it uses different factors with different weights to identify spam. I was working while watching, so I missed if it was possible to easily changing the weighting on those tests.

During the presentation one or two people mentioned that they were using his solution, CFFormProtect, and that it has resulting in a dramatic reduction in comment spam. 

If you are  having trouble with comment spam (or form spam of any kind), I would encourage you to take a look at CFFormProtect. 

This was certainly a good start to the newly active group and I look forward to more presentations in the future.