I widely advertise my instant messaging ID’s as I want potential clients to be able to find me easily. But the problem with doing that is that I end up with a lot of spam messages every day.

Never a day goes by without automated robots sending me instant messages inviting me to talk dirty with them or to go to a certain website to stock up on my Viagra tablets. Now normally I would just block them but this only really works for one or two messages a day.

If you are getting more than a few a day, you may need Bot Sentry. Bot Sentry guards your Pidgin application and disallows anyone not on your contact list from contacting you until they have answered a pre-defined question that you have set :

botsentry1

As you can see, you can decide what question and answer to set and when the person has answered correctly, they can then message you and their user ID will be added to a “white list” so they don’t have to answer the question everytime they want to chat with you.

But make the question easy – don’t write something like “Please give the exact population figure of Transylvania – including all the vampires”. Just give an easy question with only one possible answer that a real person can answer right away. Obviously this will stop the automated bots in their tracks and you can now enjoy your day without IM’s popping up inviting you to join the Gay Network.

(By Mark O’Neill)

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Filed under: Linux corner - @ March 6, 2009 6:23 pm

Tags: pidgin, pidgin plugins