Archive | February 23, 2012

Spam honeypot and Spam: 0

Yes, that say spam: 0. My blog has no spams after I installed a honeypot spam trapper.

I read a method for catching spam last week, I have deployed it on my blog, and I must say the result is astonishing!

The idea is simple. We add a new textarea (or input type=”text”) field, and we are going to use CSS to make it invisible by setting: visibility: hidden. To the user, they won’t know that there is an invisible field, when they are filling in a legit comment the honeypot will be empty, however to a bot, since they are not smart enough to figure out that the textarea is a honeypot, therefore will add content to that invisible form field.

So on the server side, we will check the content of the honeypot, if it is empty, then we know that it is either human, or the spam bot is avoiding it, however if the honeypot is not empty, then we know it is a bot. This method is effective for the majority of the users on the Internet, unless if someone is using text based browser, or has CSS disabled. This can be solved by placing a passage of text with the similar effect of “Keep the textarea empty”.

Also, another method to ensure that we are always 1 step ahead of the honeypot, we can make the honeypot’s name and id a rolling field, as well as the legitimate fields.

UPDATE

Spam: 1,

“This is the accurate Simplefolio and WordPress 3.1 (3.2.1) fix | Bill’s Portfolio diary for anyone who wants to assay out out roughly this message. You observance so some its virtually wearing to contend with you (not that I real would want…HaHa). You definitely put a new twist on a topic thats been printed most for years. Nice hokum, just enthusiastic!”

Not sure if spam bot is smart or just got lucky, time to do rolling names on form fields.

Ruby on rails

As a seasoned web application developer, I have to say ruby on rails is some serious /magical voodoo automagical s##t/, compared to the more traditional Java/.Net/PHP, which are fortunately are all C styled syntax languages. I am still exploring ruby, and trying to figure out what everything does what.

Ruby on rails is one serious framework, it make developing a breeze, we were able to develop the first production ready release of our application in less than three weeks.