Message Board

Tracking Harvesters/Spammers

Something Not Making Sense

Author: J.Yard2 (21 Apr 07 3:01pm)

I have a Honey Pot installed and according to the stats it has handed out a bunch of addresses. However the page that links to my Honey Pot has had 0 (that is zero) hits.

How can this be?

Re: Something Not Making Sense

Author: M.Prince (21 Apr 07 5:37pm)

It could be that you're seeing an artifact of how we cache hand outs. We "load" your honey pot with addresses when it is installed. These addresses are then handed out from the cache as spiders visit your page. As the cache gets low, the database refills it. The purpose for this is to ensure that our responses are fast and continue even when our database is down. I doubt that's the cause, but it may be. We've made some changes recently to support some new features. It could be that these features caused some reporting weirdness. Rest assured this is only cosmetic.

Are you sure that's the only page that links to your honey pot? Are you sure your stats are being properly reported? Does your stats program show hits to the honey pot itself? Have you visited the honey pot? If so... that will result in multiple addresses being handed out, even if they're just to you.

Matthew.

Re: Something Not Making Sense

Author: J.Yard2 (21 Apr 07 6:56pm)

Are you sure that's the only page that links to your honey pot?
Yes

Are you sure your stats are being properly reported?
Yes - When I go to that page, ether via the main page link or directly the count increaments as expected.

Does your stats program show hits to the honey pot itself?
Yes and no. Since the page has a ssi to the Honey Pot - Yes.
But going directly to the Honey Pot without going through the page - No.

Have you visited the honey pot? If so... that will result in multiple addresses being handed out, even if they're just to you.
Yes - But it keeps handing out more even though I haven't visted for quite some time.

So the 'Addresses Issued on Your Site(s)' stat is what exactly?
The number my site(s) have ready and waiting to hand out or the number it has handed out to visitors? Does Project Honey Pot have any documentation that explains exactly what the stats mean?

Re: Something Not Making Sense

Author: M.Prince (21 Apr 07 11:32pm)

> So the 'Addresses Issued on Your Site(s)' stat is what exactly?

It's a rough snapshot of the number of addresses that have been issued. Some of those will have been issued to non-harvester visitors (like you, or Google's robot). Over time that number is accurate however, in the short run, because of our caching system, it may not be exactly precise.

One more thing to realize is that we've begun, in certain instances, handing out multiple addresses per visit. This is because some harvesters only care about .com or .uk or whatever addresses. As a result, a single visit could mean a significant number of handouts.