Message Board

Newbie/Basic Questions

Is Honeypot helping or making things worse?

Author: A.Bolchis (7 Nov 08 5:26pm)

Prior to Joining Projecthoneypot I only had to deal with spam in my inbox and not too much of that either, however since joining Honeypot It has gotten so bad that I am getting attacked threefold and on all the Sites Honeypot claim to protect. Well Projecthoneypot made it 100 times worse on all the sites i have so called protected.I feel that there is a connection here somehow. Have lost all my sites ranking and this only since joining Projecthoneypot. Not very Happy as this service does not seem to stop spam but the opossite it encourages it. Very Skeptic about being part of this right now. I am hit by Comment spammers several times a day because of Honeypot. Not very happy.

Adrian Bolchis

Re: Is Honeypot helping or making things worse?

Author: M.Prince (8 Nov 08 3:09pm)

Adrian:
Thanks for contacting us via email and on the message board. I've sent much of this information to you via email, but I wanted to post it here as well in response to your comments.

From your message above, it's not clear how you're participating in the Project. For people following along at home, via email Adrian let me know that he's install honey pots, which appear to be functioning normally, and also attempted to install http:BL using open source software developed by a third party.

First, we have not seen any other reports of sites participating in the Project being targeted by spammers. Coincidence does not prove causality and, in this case, I think what is likely happening is that Adrian's site has gotten caught up in the massive increase in comment spam that is happening Internet-wide. This is even more evident when you examine Adrian's particular web pages and see that they don't have some of the protections in place that most blogs now, unfortunately, have to count as standard.

Second, while there's no reason to believe that an increase in comment spam can be attributed to Project Honey Pot membership, I am troubled that http:BL is not blocking much of the garbage being posted to your site. This is a new complaint and not the typical one we hear about http:BL. While an IP blacklist will never be a complete solution to something like comment spam, we typically hear that sites with http:BL report about a 70% decrease in the volume of comments they had before being protected. Combined with some other measures, this becomes a very effective tool.

To check Adrian's case, I requested his http:BL key. We searched his key against the DNS logs in our system to see whether queries were being correctly made. While we're not sure of the reason, we didn't find any queries that had been made with his key. My hunch is that something is either wrong with the version of the http:BL implementation he is using, or that it has been misconfigured. I've sent Adrian the developer's contact information to work on ensuring that it is up and running correctly.

We're always interested in either positive or negative stories of members, and especially those of you using http:BL. While we get some feedback on how the tool is helping people stop bad robots from visiting the site, it is hard for us to develop reliable metric on how good a job it's doing. Please don't hesitate to post if you've had an experience like Adrian's or, of course, something more positive.