Techdirt: Inside Craigslist’s Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers

I haven’t gone on CL for the longest time specifically due to spam. The personals are just full of shit. I’m usually pretty good at spotting spam, but it got to the point where the effort it took to spot non-spammer outweighed the benefits. I’m not going to spend two hours browsing the w4m section to send emails to five women who may or may not decide to continue talking with me. In a worst case scenario, I would’ve wasted two hours, plus time spent on composing the email, and ended up with nothing. If I were “lucky”, I’d maybe get a date out of it and never see her again.

I wonder if there is a working technological solution to fight spam. OCR systems will defeat image based verification. I was thinking about those “What does 2+2 equal?” systems, but that’s not too hard to work around. The questions to ask is: what is easy for a human to figure out but hard for a computer to figure out? OCR will crack text. Plain text can be read, cataloged, and analyzed. Maybe we could make some kind of mini-game. I wonder if a computer could figure out a randomly generated side scroller game…