I think I would have absolutely no compunction about waterboarding spammers. Not to get any information out of them, mind you — just to make them suffer.
Yeah, yeah, I know …
But having just spent a few hours trying to fix comment spam in my old photo galleries, I’m not feeling terribly nice toward the group as a whole. And it’s not even the various “performance enhancer” types of spams I’m talking about here, but pretty nasty and disgusting pr0n links spambotted alongside pictures of my wife and daughter.
Yeah, a bit of good thuggish bloodletting and infliction of gratuitous pain sounds pretty good right about now.
(For the record, I thought I had addressed this particular security gap, but I happened to run across some things showing up in my web site visit logs, and tracked them down to discover that (a) I hadn’t stopped folks from adding comments in all areas, and (b) even where I had, it was still possible to search for the comments. Rrg. I’ve turned off all the comment options, and 600ed both the comment add module and the search module. Which should do the trick, a lot more easily than individually deleting each of the several hundred-or-more spam comments.)
Note: No, I don’t think I would torture a spammer. Not really. But I might enjoy shackling one up and making him/her think I was going to torture them … Or, failing that, I might be convinced to seriously key their car.
Knee Capping sounds like the right level of punishment to me.
Some sort of badge of shame or tattoo so that every person they meet immediately knows they are spammers.
The Scarlet S!