Show HN: A contact form that prunes spam | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A contact form that prunes spam

powreach.com

8 pointsrepartix6 comments

Hello HN, I made an online contact form prevents people from saying everything is important. It's also a way to cut down on spam.

Check it out at https://powreach.com. It's powered by LTC.

I also made the opposite of an online contact form. You can put down a deposit, basically in escrow, and send a link to someone to redeem it. For example, you can ask someone to give you feedback on a side project and you can pay them, without knowing their payment info. The recipient attaches their payment info when they receive the link.

This is all built on top of https://repowcha.com. I see rePOWCHA as a big missing block in the Internet, with multiple uses cases that remain to be discovered.

Let me know what you think.

To the author, what i understood from the comment and website, that a user has to pay an amount to prove the user intent and it's not a spam/joke/anything else. If everything works well, there will be a refund.

After looking at this for a few minutes, I still don't understand what it is. Where's the anti-spam system? I thought there would be a write-up outlining the anti-junk algorithm.

The anti-spam system is that the user has to pay to send you the message. If you ask for $50 per message, and the message is spam, you'll flag the message as "spam" which means you get the $50 and the spammer doesn't get their refund. At high enough cost spammers can't reach you.

If you're powerful and get 100 emails a day for things that take up your time, you don't want to read 95 of them, but do want those 5 that matter to still be sent to you, by people who are confident enough that their email is important.

I believe this is meant to be a joke [1]:

> CAPTCHA that stops Humans

> Yes, it stops bots too.

[1] https://repowcha.com/

It's not a joke. rePOWCHA stops bots. If a bot automates sending the amount to get by the CAPTCHA, the bot won't be able to afford paying this amount at scale, because when you notice that the bot abused your service you'll flag it as "abuse" and won't refund the bot's deposit. Past some threshold of $x per CAPTCHA, bots can't afford to bypass them.

The reason spam is everywhere is that the cost of sending spam is low. The solution proposed by rePOWCHA is to increase the cost. It's a form of proof-of-work.

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