I’m a big fan of having small classes. I’m not a big fan of having huge specs for a small class/object. Every time I see an opportunity to DRY my specs, I take it.

Today I wrote a spec to make sure that we gracefully ignore SPAMmy contact requests in the Ombu Labs contact page. It initially looked like this:

test "gracefully ignores spammy requests with valid attributes" do
  @valid_contact = contacts(:two)
  attributes = @valid_contact.attributes
                             .merge(email_confirmation: @valid_contact.email)

  assert_no_difference("Contact.count") do
   post :create, contact: attributes, format: 'js'
  end

  assert_response :success
end

The new behavior adds a simple SPAM trap field that bots will usually fall for. If a bot is submitting the email_confirmation field (which is hidden by a CSS class), then it is SPAM and it gracefully ignores the request.

The test only tests the scenario where the bot is performing an AJAX request. Then I thought that SPAM bots might try to submit a non-AJAX html request.

So I wrote some more:

test "gracefully ignores spammy requests with valid attributes (AJAX)" do
  @valid_contact = contacts(:two)
  attributes = @valid_contact.attributes
  attributes.merge!(email_confirmation: @valid_contact.email)

  assert_no_difference("Contact.count") do
   post :create, contact: attributes, format: 'js'
  end

  assert_response :success
end

test "gracefully ignores spammy requests with valid attributes (HTML)" do
  @valid_contact = contacts(:two)
  attributes = @valid_contact.attributes
  attributes.merge!(email_confirmation: @valid_contact.email)

  assert_no_difference("Contact.count") do
   post :create, contact: attributes, format: 'html'
  end

  assert_response :success
end

Now that is ridiculous, why should I copy/paste this? There is only one parameter (format) that varies between them.

Read more here!