Everyone hates spam, but what are you doing to help put an end to it? Well, now if you own a Web site you can seriously contribute to taking Spam off the streets! Just install a HoneyPot on your server and you’ll be helping to generate data that can actually put some Spammers behind bars.
According to the HoneyPot Project:
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.
To participate in Project Honey Pot, webmasters need only install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website. We handle the rest — automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, we anticipate installing Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to your website.
We collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.
If you happen to be running a Blog you can now also install a Honey Pot plugin to report and eliminate comment spam. The Weblog Tools Collection recently reported:
A few days ago, Project Honey Pot introduced a new service, http:BL, “a system that allows website administrators to take advantage of the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep suspicious and malicious web robots off their sites”. A honeypot is a trap set to detect email havesters and spam robots: this should ring a bell to most bloggers, I guess.
The beauty of Project Honey Pot is that anyone can contribute : just register an account, download the script and put it somewhere on your blog. It’s been more effective than I would have thought and wished : the day I had my first honeypot installed, it detected a new and before unseen comment spammer.
Contributing to this project is an easy way of making the web a cleaner place, and it will also benefit to another Wordpress related spam-fighting project : the almighty Bad Behavior will soon implement the http:BL API.
Using the API itself is fairly easy. I’ve written a short tutorial, Honey Pot & http:BL Simple PHP Script, showing how to use the API to increase protection around your beloved blog. And for those who are not interested in writing their own script, there is already an http:BL WordPress Plugin waiting for you.
So, what are you waiting for? Go get you a Honey Pot and help fight the scurge of the Internet!