Blocking Spam in Rails Applications
Whenever you accept user-generated content, you run the risk of opening your system up to spammers. This is most well-known as a problem for blogs that allow comments; but, every relatively open site faces this challenge.
There are many potential solutions to this problem—you could write your own Bayesian filter, manually delete and blacklist IPs, or rely on an external service, for instance. For speed of development and ease of use, making use of an external service is by far the best way to go. For this post, we’re going to take a quick look at Akismet.
Tyrant is a "meta" Rails application designed to run other Rails applications.
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I have used several different strategies for achieving this, and have settled on the plugin seed_fu to accomplish this task. Because it uses plain ruby files you have quite a few more options for manipulating your seed data as opposed to using fixtures. I have found that this lets me create seed data that is much less brittle than fixtures can be. You can find seed_fu on...