News / Article: Project Honey Pot - Fights SPAM... | Hoytocoyo, musica en directo Barcelona

I came across this website http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ when looking for ways to decrease the amount of spam posted on some of the websites our company has created. Not that they get huge amounts of spam, but still I was quite curious to see if there was something else than CAPTCHA.

A CAPTCHA takes your time and might even lower accessability. I actually found a lot of ideas on http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Spam_Tools even though we are not talking about Wordpress sites. By following the link to http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/ I was sucked into the Honey Pots website and it caught my attention because the strategy seemed to be the direct opposite of the rest.

Where all traditionel approaches to reduce comment spam on blogs focuses on keeping out evil spambots, the Project Honey Pot actually invites the monsters right in and practically begs for spam.

But it's a trap! When they do take the bait, they are registered and from that point on monitored on world wide networks.

Now I want a honey pot page - because anyone can get one! I might not get comment spam every day, but I got it once and it hurts! So I wanna help out identifying spambots. I might also be able to use the data collected by the community to prevent access to comments for clients that match the profiles of spambots.

Project Honey Pot has been collecting profiles on email harvesters and spam mail senders for two years, but they have only just started focusing on comment spam but I see substantial potential.

I only see one thing that possibly could render Project Honey Pot's email harvester identification ineffective: If spammers make it a rule never to send any spam to a harvested email address until it's been confirmed by two independent harvesters, they will never get caught.