recently, my website has been hit with automated russian spam bots. more specifically, my comment section was taken over by them -- and their deliberate attempts to advertise websites, or even worse, provide themselves backlinks. fortunately, this would pose as a great lesson for me.

defeating the bots was interesting, as i explored as many options as possible. for now, i have settled with using invisible recaptcha for the best user-experience. however, there are other methods such as invisible form fields to detect bots which may later be employed. i knew that captchas would eventually be required to prevent spam, so this does not come as a huge surprise to me!