Five minutes after I placed my new django-based website online, I got my first spam. Yesterday, I got as many comments (all spam) as I used to get in a month when this website was based on ExpressionEngine!

Of course EE’s captcha was enabled, so it helped, but spam still got through – a few every other day.

So, what can I do about it?

• Conventional captchas are not so efficient (cracked, cheap human labor, …), and they are often as tough on humans as they are on scripts;
• Akismet: I don’t want to depend on external entities unless I have exhausted all other possibilities;
• The popular reCAPTCHA – apparently often cracked, and doesn’t fit my external policy;
• “Are you human” thingies, like simple mathematical formulas – I strongly believe “1+4” to be easily parsable and calculable by any script, and I find most other solution I found too annoying to implement and/or use (like “drag the pencil image to some box on the right”).

So what about bogofilter?

First, Wordpress, then, for a year, ExpressionEngine. And now, since yesterday, this website runs under django!

Well, it actually runs on much more than django:

• django for the basic web stuff, URL handling, admin interfaces and such;
• the awesome jinja 2 template engine;
• the clean and flexible reStructured Text markup language for my own posts;
• the fabulous pygments syntax highlighter;
• for the comment markup, markdown;
• the search system is, as always, the overly-fast Sphinx full-text search engine;
• redis for the caching;
• django modules like mptt, tagging and imagekit;
• and so much more…

Just like the previous version, based on EE, used much more than EE. For example, its search system was also Sphinx-based. (And the humanized markup language I used was called “HTML” – I don’t really like Markdown nor textile, and reST is only in python :)

Why the move? Well… such a simple question deserves a simple answer: I personally have much more fun pythonning than PHP-ing. Maybe because I did so much PHP, and python is still new to me. Or maybe my mind works more like python :P

Anyway, my first complaint: using django’s native comment system certainly attracts spam! So I suppose I’ll have to do something about that, yeah! More pythonning to do! >:)