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Newbie/Basic Questions

Creating a Honey Pot 'Tar Pit'

Author: N.Hoeller (27 Dec 12 8:25am)

I run a few Drupal sites that get a lot of spam registration attempts and spam comments. The Drupal Mollom and Spambot plugins do a good job filtering out 98% of the rubbish. I am evaluating the Drupal http:BL plugin to add a further layer of filtering.

The bad news is that the more effective the filters, the less information is collected about the spammers, which may eventually reduce the effectiveness of the filters. I feed the reports through fail2ban which creates firewall rules that block repeat offenders. Rather than dropping the traffic, would it make sense to forward traffic from these repeat offenders to a 'hidden' Drupal site that allows spammers to register and post comments at will, using Project Honey Pot for monitoring and tracking spam activity? I will even make it easy for the spammers to harvest the email addresses of their kind.

If the concept is sound, has anyone had practical experience implementing something like this and can share suggestions?

Re: Creating a Honey Pot 'Tar Pit'

Author: N.Hoeller (27 Dec 12 3:33pm)

After having a closer look at the Project Honey Pot script, the focus is on bots, whereas I seem to be infested by spammers with eyeballs and fingers. The overall concept may still have merit but I suspect will need an additional reporting package like StopForumSpam.