Project Honey Pot WordPress Plugin
Description | Features | Screenshots | Demo | Version | License
Changelog | Download | Installation Instructions | FAQ | Support
Description
This plugin automatically scatters invisible links to Project Honey Pot spam traps throughout your wordpress blog to help catch and stop spammers.
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, Project Honey Pot 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.
Install this plugin to help contribute to the project and catch spammers by hiding links to honey pots (spam traps) in your blog. The links are never visible to human visitors, but the spambots and crawlers follow them straight into the traps.
Features
- Outputs randomly generated invisible links to honey pots in order to catch spambots
- Specify a locally installed honey pot, a quick link to someone else’s honey pot, or both
- Check if the current visitor is listed in Project Honey Pot’s HTTP:BlackList
- Output links to all visitors or just those listed in the HTTP:BL
- Fully customize each location in which links are inserted
Screenshots
Options Page
Demo
Check out the source of this page! (or any page on my site for that matter)
You’ll see several links to http://andrewensley.com/seaworthy.php (my honey pot) that you don’t see on the rendered page! Crawlers and harvesters don’t know these links aren’t visible and follow them straight into a trap.
Version
The current version of this plugin is 1.0.0
License
This plugin is released under the GPLv3 license and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law. I make no guarantee this plugin will work for you.
Changelog
2009-09-11 – 1.0.0:
- Initial release
Download
Download the latest version from the WordPress plugin page
Installation Instructions
- Unzip the files from the download file
- Upload the entire `project-honey-pot` folder to your `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Go to the Project Honey Pot options page and enter at least one honey pot URL
- Enjoy knowing that you are helping to make the world a better place
Frequently Asked Questions
One or more of my plugins processes post content. How will honey pot links be handled?
Honey pot links are inserted into the content of the page via actions and filters. This may cause problems with other plugins using the same filters that don’t know these links are supposed to be invisible. I’m working on a fix. For now, simply try to disable each of the Actions and Filters on the options page until you find the source(s) of the problem. In this case, disabling the `the_content` filter, should solve your problem.
Support
Please post any problems, comments, or suggestions on this page or contact me if you have an urgent problem.
If this plugin is useful to you, please consider donating:
…or maybe even buy me something from my wishlist:
Just wanted to point out something. If you use a link summarizer, like this one, the honeypot will show up in the list of links on the page. It was easy to remove using the options on that particular plugin, but you might want to mention it in your Other Information or FAQ.
@Tom Brincefield
Good point. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll check out how his plugin hooks into the post content. There may be a way for me to get around it in my plugin. If so, I’m sure the same strategy could avoid issues with many other plugins.
Andrew,
Great idea and thanks for the work!
Some suggestions/things to look if they can be solved:
- When I allow the plugin in “the_post” hook it will insert a spamtrap link in the body tag of the page. Creating some formatting problems
- Consider adding “projecthoneypot” as a one word keyword for the plugin at wordpress.org. All the other releated plugins show up for that but yours.
- Under installation instructions point out that unless they have already configured a honeypot or use quicklinks, people must register and configure a honeypot as per step 1-3 on the projecthoneypot add instructions page. Step 4 being where your plugin enters the game.
- Maybe put a link somewhere to the related http:BL plugin? To clarify that your plugin traps but doesn’t block spammers, but that there is one plugin that can.
thanks again,
-kjell
@kjell
Thanks for that feedback.
-To address the first problem with the ‘the_post’ hook, that’s why the hooks are configurable. Every theme allows those hooks in different places and some plugins change the way they behave as well. I should have had something in the FAQ about it though. I’ll be adding something shortly.
-I’ll add the projecthoneypot keyword, instructions, and link to the http:BL plugin to the next release. I’m trying to fix an upgrade bug at the moment.
I just noticed that the links are messing up the formatting on my results from a Category search.and on my Archives pages. I have not added in any of the risky options on the plugin, but I am not familiar enough with php to know what to clear to prevent the bad formatting from showing up. Any ideas?
After looking at the Vigilance theme‘s source code, it looks like the ‘the_time’ hook is the culprit. Try disabling that one.
Yep, that got it. Thanks for the quick response. I wasn’t looking forward to trying each of them and reloading the pages over and over. I suppose I could try something silly like try and learn PHP on my own, but I still have problems with CSS.