[HCoop-Discuss] spam honey pot

[Justin S. Leitgeb]

Hi all,

I recently set up an account with the "Project Honey Pot."  One 
component of this project allows you to set up a "honey pot" page on 
your web site that gathers information on web bots harvesting email 
addresses for spamming purposes.  You can do this in a way that is 
invisible to most site visitors, and it works transparently once set 
up.  It only took me a minute to set up and the php page that it 
generated (which you have to install on your site) runs perfectly on 
HCoop's current infrastructure.

Eventually, I think that we could implement the "black hole" software at 
the server level to stop spam bots from harvesting all of the sites on 
our servers.  This might help us to save bandwidth and server resources 
as well.  I would certainly wait until the new infrastructure is stable 
to suggest such a change, of course.

For now, though, I just wanted to toss this out to the group in case 
anyone is interested in experimenting with the honey pot software on 
your own web sites.  It's easy and I think helps to fight back against 
increasingly annoying spamming practices. 

Here is the project URL:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/

Have fun and I'd like to hear your experiences with this software!

Justin