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 Icon warns spambots away?
Author: J.Schipmolder   (17 May 07 3:20am)
I have on my site the suggested quicklinks for my account as well as the "MEMBER OF PROJECT HONEYPOT" icon. Would that icon be a warning to spam bots to avoid scanning the page, or is it too late by the time they see the icon?
 
 Re: Icon warns spambots away?
Author: M.Prince   (17 May 07 12:02pm)
Interestingly, we've found that some "smart" harvesters avoid pages with words like "honey pot" or "spam trap" included on them. Since the MEMBER OF PROJECT HONEY POT box includes those words, some harvesters will pass over pages that include it. We used to include it on all our honey pot pages but found about 20% of harvesters were avoiding those pages when it was there. We had a rise in spam sent to spam traps when we removed it. In other words, you are likely to have a small drop in spam if you include it.
 
 Re: Icon warns spambots away?
Author: J.Schipmolder   (17 May 07 3:13pm)
I'm glad I asked. I changed the icon to this plain text, hoping that the inserted spaces may do their intended job:

MEMBER OF PROJECT H O N E Y P O T
www DOT project h o n e y p o t DOT org

My problem of course is how to get folks to come to your site without giving anything away to spam bots.
 
 Re: Icon warns spambots away?
Author: B.Trevithick   (23 May 07 3:21pm)
For what it's worth, I keep all of my links to the honey pot hidden via CSS, and to keep the validators happy I simply include a middot for each one.

My links look list this:

<a class="hide" href="where_my_honey_pot_is">·</a>

And my CSS just looks like this:

.hide {
display: none;
}

I don't fly the banner of PH, but I do include a link to it in a page of about a hundred other off-site links.

I don't know if anyone is clear on exactly how these bots are coded, so it's a crap shoot trying to figure out whether/how to hide things. My CSS approach is just to hide them from humans, although that might not be a great idea either.

When Steve Gibson was under DDOS attack by a bunch of script kiddies using IRC controlled botnets, somebody kindly dropped a copy of one of the zombies into his anonymous Internet drop box, and from there he was able to figure out the rest himself. I wish we could get our hands on a few of the spam bots to see what makes them tick!

Great read for anyone who hasn't already read it:

http://www.grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm

I heard it was the most popular page on the Internet when it was first published.

Bob
 
 Re: Icon warns spambots away?
Author: J.Yard2   (1 Jun 07 2:18am)
"My problem of course is how to get folks to come to your site without giving anything away to spam bots."

Simple. Just use a client side JavaScript to build the link, just like for protecting email addresses from harvesters. From what I understand, most bots don't execute client side scripts, as it would make them vulnerable.
 
 Re: Icon warns spambots away?
Author: M.Nordhoff   (11 Jun 07 2:29am)
On the other hand, as the PHPot site says somewhere, it wouldn't exactly be a bad thing if putting a line of HTML on your website would make the spambots stay away!
 
 Re: Icon warns spambots away?
Author: D.West3   (13 Sep 07 3:23am)
Hi folks,
Just a 'newbie' but was finding it difficult to to get my pages to 'validate' at w3c - xhtml.

Original code was given was:
<head><style type="text/css">a.vocabr{color:#FFF;font:bold 10px arial,sans-serif;text-decoration:none;}</style></head>

<body>
<table cellspacing="0"cellpadding="0"border="0"style="background:#999;width:230px;"><tr><td valign="top"style="padding: 1px 2px 5px 4px;border-right:solid 1px #CCC;"><span style="font:bold 30px arial,sans-serif;color:#666;top:0px;position:relative;">@</span></td><td valign="top" align="left" style="padding:3px 0 0 4px;"><a href="http://www.projecthoneypot.org/" class="vocabr">MEMBER OF PROJECT HONEY POT</a><br/><a href="http://www.unspam.com"class="vocabr">Spam Harvester Protection Network<br/>provided by Unspam</a></td></tr></table>
</body>

Thanks to B.Trvithick above, I have now replace with this:

Nothing in the head section anymore.

<body>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" id="honeypot1">
<tr><td valign="top" id="honeypot2">
<span id="honeypot3">@</span></td>
<td valign="top" align="left" id="honeypot4"><a href="http://www.projecthoneypot.org/" class="vocabr">MEMBER OF PROJECT HONEY POT</a><br/><a href="http://www.unspam.com" class="vocabr">Spam Harvester Protection Network<br/>provided by Unspam</a></td></tr></table>
</body>

And this in my .css file:
#honeypot1{background:#999;width:230px;}
#honeypot2{padding: 1px 2px 5px 4px;border-right:solid 1px #CCC;}
#honeypot3{font:bold 30px arial,sans-serif;color:#666;top:0px;position:relative;}
#honeypot4{padding:3px 0 0 4px;}
a.vocabr{color:#FFF;font:bold 10px arial,sans-serif;text-decoration:none;}

Even took to w3c and it finally validated as XHTML.
It also displays as the original on each page.

All the e-mail addresses displayed on my site are ascii encoded as well to help these pesky varmints get headaches.

All I got to do now is to find if my 'server' people will allow a honeypot or to find out more about 'quicklinks'

Hope this is of some use.



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