What can be done to prevent spam in forum-like apps?

Question

Are there ways except CAPTCHAs for web apps like pastie.org or p.ramaze.net? CAPTCHAs take too long for a small paste for my taste.

Answer 1

Personally, on my blog, I was getting a lot of spam from bots. After analyzing what the spam looked like, I did up some quick regex to detect things like a post full of links, or cases where the subject, comment, and name field were all filled with the same text. I display a nice user friendly message if the post gets blocked. Since I employed this technique, I went from hundreds of spam comments a week to virtually zero. I guess what I'm trying to say, is analyze what kind of spam traffic you are getting, and see if there's an easy way to cut it out, with just some simple analysis, rather than resorting to something like captcha.