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Newbie/Basic Questions

Have I found what I’m looking for?

Author: S.Hinkins (1 Nov 08 10:02pm)

Hello Honeypotproject

I have a website that’s started getting lots of attention from comment spammers in Wordpress and vBulletin, most are blocked from actually posting but the amount of attempts is just shocking. I spent about 6 hours going through one of my site logs today and decided that it isn’t much fun.
I came looking for some way to stop these gits before they even try but have found it a bit confusing, why would I want to put honeypot addresses on my site and are these the addresses of spammers? What happens to a donated mx record and how does it affect me?

Maybe I’m looking for a more simple bot trap, do you have any recommendations.

Many thanks

Re: Have I found what I’m looking for?

Author: M.Prince (3 Nov 08 10:20am)

Sorry for the confusion. Our mission has expanded over time and sometimes the content of the site hasn't kept up.

Originally, Project Honey Pot tracked email spam only. To do that, we had volunteers around the world install a small script that generated a fake page. On that fake page we'd hand out email addresses that were tagged to the visitor to the page. Since we didn't want spammers to be able to tell what trap email addresses were fake we asked volunteers to donate MX records to help us generate these spamtrap email addresses.

Fast forward a few years and a new spam problem emerges: comment or blog spam. These spammers fill website forms with junk messages and cause not only a mess on websites, but a huge pain for search engines trying to accurately rank sites on the Internet. While we didn't originally anticipate this problem, our network of honey pot scripts installed on thousands of websites around the world allowed us to do something about it. We began handing out trap forms, in addition to trap email addresses, to lure in the comment spammers.

Today, if you install a honey pot script, or add a QuickLink to your site, you're contributing data that helps the community of Project Honey Pot users stop both types of spammers. To make this data more accessible, we created http:BL. This simple data service has been incorporated into a number of plugins (including several for WordPress) and allows you to automatically stop known-bad visitors from visiting your site.

So... you should install a honey pot in order to help gather data on bad robots online, both those gathering email addresses and those posting blog spam. You should donate an MX to help us generate more spamtrap email addresses. And you can use http:BL to benefit from the data that the community is generating in order to protect your site.

Hopefully that clears it up. Just makes it more clear to me that we're long overdue for a thorough website redesign.