LinkSleeve : SLV : Spam Link Verification

Spam Link Verification system: an XML-RPC implementation to filter user input with spam links.

The Concept

There are many forms of link-spam but all rely on a single sticky identifier: The link. Because it is humanly impossible to post thousands of times in an hour to guestbooks, blogs, forums, etc. across the web, link spam is vulnerable to a throttling mechanism. If we could track a large number of posts, we could find and throttle link spam. How do we do that?..

The Method

Unlike many other software-specific spam tools, SLV is universally applicable. It simply takes a bit of text, extracts any urls, checks against a database of recently added urls across the web, and determines if a reasonable threshold has been exceeded. The XML-RPC script returns a 1 for accept and a 0 for reject. This means that any type of web form - whether a post to a guestbook or blog, a forum entry, even an email form - can be protected from link spam.