A few days ago, Project Honey Pot introduced a new service, http:BL, “a system that allows website administrators to take advantage of the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep suspicious and malicious web robots off their sites”. A honeypot is a trap set to detect email havesters and spam robots : this should ring a bell to most bloggers, I guess.
The beauty of Project Honey Pot is that anyone can contribute : just register an account, download the script and put it somewhere on your blog. It’s been more effective than I would have thought and wished : the day I had my first honeypot installed, it detected a new and before unseen comment spammer.
Contributing to this project is an easy way of making the web a cleaner place, and it will also benefit to another WordPress related spam-fighting project : the almighty Bad Behavior will soon implement the http:BL API.
Using the API itself is fairly easy. I’ve written a short tutorial, Honey Pot & http:BL Simple PHP Script, showing how to use the API to increase protection around your beloved blog. And for those who are not interested in writing their own script, there is already an http:BL WordPress Plugin waiting for you.
I installed the http:BL plugin just the other day when you linked it and it has significantly cut back on the amount of comment spam I receive on one of my blogs. I’m excited to hear that it’ll be integrated into Bad Behavior as this plugin already blocked a decent amount of bad traffic.
Even so, comment spammers are getting sneakier and sneakier. I had one caught by Akismet today that’s so convincing (on-topic, good grammar and spelling, etc.) that I actually had to send an e-mail to see if it was real.
@Jesse: Make sure you’re running the latest version of the http:BL wp-plugin as the original did look ups on referrer IP instead of the client’s IP 🙂
If you look at the Bad Behavior site I’m not sure they will be integrating http:BL into Bad Behavior – they actually created http:BL because integrating the http:BL API with Bad Behavior was not as simple as they hoped.
Yeah, I started using Honey Pots to thwart comment spam a long time ago, back before Project Honey Pot started tracking comment spammers. It did such a fantastic job (back then, anyway) that I even went Commando on comment spam plugins for a time. So much freedom! :o)
I got involved with this a few days ago. An excellent idea.
thanks. just installed the plugin.
Wait, I don’t get it… if my site is comment-spam free due to Akismet, why would I bother with this? Does my implementation benefit others even though Akismet is catching all my spam? If so, maybe I’d throw it into the mix, but if I don’t have a comment spam problem, does my implentation somehow help the community?
David » Akismet catches spam that is posted by bots. Honeypots identifies spam bots, email harvesters or any kind of suspicious bots. With honeypots data, you will be able to block bots before they even post their spam (ie they won’t even reach your site)
Installing a honeypot *will* benefit others since it will help catch known or new spammers, no matter if they post a comment or not on your blog, and no matter if their comments are catched by akismet or not
sweet, this sounds huge. I need to check it out on the weekend, then install it site-wide, because I get so much spam every day!
Ah, thanks for explaining, Ozh!
Great stuff! Will install it soon.
You’ve inspired me to install honey pot at my blog. Anything to curb spam stress. Thanks for the info.
Is this plugin Google friendly? I don’t want to mess my listings or rankings with Google bots.