Project Honeypot takes up the fight against comment spam

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Comment spam is a pest. This site, running 4 different installations of WordPress, is protected by Aksimet, which daily catches a few hundred automated spam comments. I just couldn’t make do without that kind of protection. Now, project Honeypot, otherwhise known for their somewhat unorthodox ways of tracking IP-addresses involved in classic mail spam, has decided to take action against blog comment spammers as well.

Conventional wisdom about comment spammers is that they are from China, Russia and Korea, but on Project Honeypot’s stats over recently caught spambot IP addresses (as shown on the right), I see more IP addresses located in the US. But then again, conventional wisdom is seldom completely wrong. USA tops the list of active comment spammer IP’s, but closely followed by Korea, Russia, Japan and China. All according to Project Honeypot’s main stats.

Today I received the following mail from them, and I think it sounds excellent. This page already has a few of my very first Quicklinks. Hidden to human users, but quite visible to comment spam bots.

Dear Nikke Lindqvist:

Tuesday is day two of the Five Days of Project Honey Pot Announcements.
Yesterday we announced QuickLinks which allow even more people to help
with the Project. Today we are announcing that Project Honey Pot has
begun tracking a new kind of online beastie: Comment Spammers.

If you’re not aware, comment spammers crept up from the depths in the
last few years. They are robots are running around the internet leaving
their comments on feed back forms, blogs, and forums. The purpose is not
only to drive traffic to the sites when people visiting the forums click
the links, but also to increase search engine rank by increasing the
number of back links to their site.

To learn more about how we’re tracking comment spammers, please visit:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/5days_tuesday.php

We turned the system on only a little over a week ago and already have
caught more than 600 unique IPs engaged in comment spamming. We expect
that number will dramatically increase over time. If you haven’t done so
already, install a honey pot or add a QuickLink to help trap comment
spammers. If you’ve already installed a honey pot there’s nothing you
need to do. The form traps necessary to catch comment spammers are
likely already being delivered to your honey pot. Login to your account
and check out your Dashboard to see what comment spammers you’ve helped
catch.

As always, if you’re prefer not to get these updates, simply login to
your Project Honey Pot account and switch off notification emails under
the settings tab. Stay tuned for our big mid-week announcement tomorrow.
Until then, make sure to let your blogging friends know there’s a new
way to track comment spammers and we need their help!

The Project Honey Pot Team

=============================
Project Honey Pot
c/o Unspam Technologies, Inc.
1901 Prospector Avenue, Suite 200
Park City, UT 84060

I must, to my shame, admit that it was quite some time since I last gave Project Honepot any attention whatsoever. I had even forgot about this site’s active honeypot, located at www.lindqvist.com/scripts/pleasedliable.php

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