New (?) Anti-Spam concept
Has everybody been watching DeathBySpam.com? Pretty disgusting, I know. Well I’ve been thinking about people’s options to fight spam. I’ve got a new*I say ‘new’ but I can’t say for sure that nobody else has thought of this — it’s simply new to me. idea, what do you think?
It’s a variation on the payment method. If you’re unfamiliar with this concept, it is where a user pays something very small, like 1¢, for each email. It’s something small enough that the user won’t mind, but a spammer would have a serious financial obstacle. But people still balk at this concept, because the internet is nice and free right now. And, as cheap as 1¢ is, it’s far from free. But with my idea, instead of it actually costing money, it’s more like a downpayment, or maybe like collateral. Here’s how it works:
When a user sends an email, they will have to put down some money. A little higher than the 1¢ — something like 10¢, you’ll see why later. But unlike the typical payment method concept, after 60 days this money is refunded by whatever service has collected it. So, in the end, it doesn’t cost the user anything, and the internet is nice and free again. But it does mean that the emailer will have to actually have the money — so a spammer sending out 10 million emails will suddenly be owing a million bucks.
Sure, they would get it back same as everybody else, but the fact that they probably wouldn’t have it in the first place would be a major obstacle. In the meantime, the service that is collecting the payments would be funded with interest accumulated in the 60 days the money is held (this is why it must be a higher value, like 10¢). So the service gets paid, the user gets their money back, and the only looser is the spammer.
Tada!
October 20th, 2003 at 11:03 pm
The problem with this method is that not everyone could afford it. Not everyone has or wants to have a credit card. The cool thing about email is that it’s a lot less costly for the end user to send mail to friends and family than snail mail. The poor folks out there who use free email accounts at the library would not be able to afford even the temporary withdrawl of their funds from their bank or credit card accounts.
Same or even bigger problem for non-profit organizations or unofficial groups (like my book club) or large poor families, etc.
October 20th, 2003 at 11:18 pm
By the way, your ass-kicking javascript pop-up notes don’t work in Mozilla. I don’t know how much you care about cross-browser compatibility, but when I mouse-over the asterisks, or whichever text inside the
<span CLASS=hiddenKey onmouseover=”document.all.msgTea.style.display=’block’;” onmouseout=”document.all.msgTea.style.display=’none’;”></span>
Mozilla spits out the following error:
document.all has no properties
Just thought you might want to know.
October 20th, 2003 at 11:38 pm
Yeah unfortunately Netscape still hasn’t realized that DOM is a standard… And since I’m writing the javascript inline each time, I’m too lazy to write a browser checker in it at the same time. I’ll open up the books and see what they have to say about it….
October 21st, 2003 at 12:25 am
Ok that should work now in Netscape too — please check it out on your end and let me know, k?
October 21st, 2003 at 3:12 am
Weird, since Mozilla comes with a DOM inspector (I used it to isolate the objects in your new script that pop up the text boxes). Supposedly Mozilla is very much geared toward the developer, though I haven’t used it as such.
The new code works, by the way. Thanks. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.
October 21st, 2003 at 9:01 am
Not too much trouble — something I needed to do anyway. I moved the meat of the script from being inline to being in a javascript include — so it will be easier for me to make more in the long run.
I guess it isn’t that Netscape doesn’t have DOM, they just have a non-standard way of doing it. IE jumped on the DOM wagon early and eagerly, and it is very solid, so with IE you can easily walk down the list of objects:
document.all.HiddenMessage.style.display=’none’;
But Netscape is weird. With some CSS commands you can do it like this:
document.HiddenMessage.top = 25;
But with others you can’t, so you’re forced to do this:
document.getElementByID(’HiddenMessage’).display=’none’;
etc. So, eventually I got it working, and things are for the better now!