Preventing Spammy Sign-Up Requests

To sign up for a Simply Testable account you provide your email address and choose an account password. Submission of that form is a sign-up request.

The submission of the sign-up form for purposes other than creating an account is a spammy sign-up request.

We received about 3,500 spammy sign-up requests over the past 30 days. That’s about 3,500 more than I’d like.

We recently all but killed spammy sign-up requests through the use of:

• a honeypot form field to prevent stupid bots
• examining web server logs to identify form submitters
• not blocking abusive IP addresses
• known-abuse checking via StopForumSpam.com

Validating Stylesheets Within IE Conditional Comments

Conditional comments are a special HTML comment syntax that will be ignored by all browsers except IE.

Such comments are commonly used to serve additional stylesheets to specific versions of IE:

<!--[if IE 8]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/ie-8-specific-overrides.css">
<![endif]-->

To be ignored is the only purpose of a comment. Unless, however, you’re dealing with IE conditional comments, in which case the contents of a comment will pretend to be HTML under the correct conditions.

Should we ignore all comments even though they might refer to resources that require CSS validation?

This is something I decided I needed to look into.

CSS Validator Improvements Overview

Today I finished deploying to production some excellent CSS validation improvements:

• updated to the latest W3C CSS validator
• validation of stylesheets in IE conditional comments
• improved CSS validation robustness

JavaScript Static Analysis Analysis

I’m in the process of removing the JavaScript static analysis feature.

I’m really quite sure that the results of such tests are of no value and that almost no-one uses this feature.

Does (relatively) anyone use this feature? Let’s flex our SQL fingers and see whether my assumptions match reality.