Codezwiz >> Forums >> The Board >> Ever hear of Project Honey Pot?

Register

I have added this anti email harvester program to my website, and was wondering if anyone had ever heard of it. The install is extremely simple, and I don't see why more people don't try it. Anyone have any experience with this?

The info from their site is this:

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.

Additionally, we will periodically collate the email messages we receive and share the resulting corpus with anti-spam developers and researchers. The data participants in Project Honey Pot will help to build the next generation of anti-spam software.

Project Honey Pot was created by Unspam, LLC � a Chicago-based anti-spam company with the singular mission of helping design and enforce effective anti-spam laws. We are always looking to partner with top software developers and enforcement authorities. If there is some way we can help you fight spam, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Their home on the web is here:
[ Register or login to view links on this board. ]

It's great to see someone finally stepping up to take action against this crap.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that if more website owners would take the time to make the email addresses on their site spam-proof in the first place, half the battle would be won and there wouldn't be a need for the program you're talking about.

There are tons of scripts out there for spam-proofing email. One that I have started using on all of my commercial sites is quite easy to use. (I still need to go back through all my client sites and implement this fix.

)

Create A Spam-Proof Mailto Link

This snippet of JavaScript creates a clickable link that launches the visitor's email application, assuming that their system is configured to work with "mailto:" hyperlinks. You can replace the link text with your own message, but see example 2 if you want to display your email address as the link text.

<s cript language=javascript>

</s cript>

A Spam-Proof Mailto Link That Shows Your eMail Address

Some visitors won't be able to use a mailto link. This snippet shows your email address in the link so they can copy and paste, or type it by hand:

<s cript language=javascript>


</s cript>

Display Your Email Address Without A Mailto Link

Here's a snippet that displays your email address without a clickable link:

<s cript language=javascript>

</s cript>

I found an old mod and updated to work with phpnuke and bbtonuke. It takes email address and changes it from [ Register or login to view links on this board. ] to test [at] test [dot] com and also makes it clickable with almost the same javascript that you list above.

You can download it here.
[ Register or login to view links on this board. ]

Register

JRSweets, I have installed your mod in the forums, and it works flawlessly. Well done. But doesn't that only work for the forums? What about the rest of the site? That is what turned me to Project Honey Pot. Installation is as simple as adding a php file to the html directory in your website. Then you go in and add "hidden" links (really simple stuff) on the web pages.

This project mainly helps detect the email harvester programs. I don't think it totally stops the harvesters. They do have tons of information on helping to make your site harvester proof.

Yeah it only works in the forums. I then turn on email thru the board and I believe then all the email address on my site are hidden.

I use Forum News Advance so if also works with the news on my main page. I am gonna check out Project Honey Pot too, it sounds interesting.