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.