I had to temporarily block all user registrations on the bug tracker for a short while due, ironically, to spam registrations.

Registration has been reopened for now, and I’m manually dealing with the spammers.

This very bad experience has motivated me to do more about web spammers.

In this case, the bug tracker is Redmine, a web application developed in Ruby on Rails.

My first thought in such a case would have been to throw Bad Behavior at the web app and let it handle the problem. Unfortunately, Bad Behavior is written in PHP, making this impossible. By this point there must be any number of Ruby/Rails apps out there which are now suffering from the spam problems that we all went through and mostly got under control years ago.

It’s therefore my intention, as part of the Bad Behavior 3.0 rewrite, to create a Ruby gem which can be used to help secure such web applications. It may not be a simultaneous release, but something has to be done, and soon.

P.S. It’s also come to my attention that Redmine hasn’t been emailing me when someone enters a new ticket into the system. This should also be fixed. I’ve also taken the time to look at every ticket currently in the system. All bugs and support requests have been responded to, and all features looked at.