Everyone coded one when learning some new web framework. This one was quite nice for Maxnet clients, because for them the address of the service was just http://url/. All was well, until it got overwhelmed by spam.

My site became top hit on Google for Amanda Bynes topless without me even knowing who the fine lady is. Among the top queries I found things like nudity, tramadol, sex, phentermine, porn, cialis and many others that I had no mention of at all.

Back then there were no easy CAPTCHA libraries. I had written a few scripts to block (redirect to a spam warning) the spam entries heuristically and done a lot of handwork on that. Still I had to pull the plug in fear of getting the whole domain into all the blacklists.

Lesson learned: always use good spam prevention. It is so easy now.