immediate, practical internet lesson

Yesterday saw the launch of the I Have, I Need board for the Earlham School of Religion that I volunteered to create. It's designed to be as informal as possible (like a physical bulletin board) and requires no account or registration to use. It's assumed that the users will all be of our particular community (ESR/Bethany + Earlham College) but no measures are taken to ensure this.

We figured that as problems cropped up, we'd fix them. Surprisingly, exactly 24 hours after launching the site, a somewhat major problem did crop up - an automated 'visitor' clicked on every link on the site (probably in search of email addresses to harvest or media files to download), including the ones that remove (again, simple honor system) users' postings from the site.

Instead of jumping to a registration system, I'm going to try adding a CAPTCHA interface to my Django forms. I found code here: http://code.google.com/p/django-captcha/ and a good example here: http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/django-and-captcha-images/ .

I'm also starting a Subversion repository so I can lessen absent-minded damage to the code in quick updates like this one...

Lesson learned: if it's on the internet, robots will find it. If robots find it, they will do things to it. These things are probably going to be negative.