Support » Requests and Feedback » suggestion for handling spammers

  • most of the spam tools around filter and prevent spam from showing up on your own site, so spammers merely go to another site that is not yet protected/filtered. to slow down spammers, is there a way to “place them on hold”? this way, their processes would be tied up for a period of time. just a thought to slow down proliferation overall, not just spam on an individual basis.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Real spambots don’t wait for a response. They hit the form directly, send the request and they’re immediately hitting another server.

    Dougal wrote the SpamTarpit plugin. It’s been some time since I used it, but it was designed to do exactly what you describe, neekoh.

    I think a better solution is to use Bad Behavior, to simply reject access outright. One or two littl tarpits aren’t seriously going to bog down the spammers.

    I also have used a tarpit in CG-Referrer (AND then bounce them), but the reality is that many spammers don’t look at the response at all, they just do a GET or POST and drop the connection as soon as it’s out the door. In the case where they DO look at the response or wait for it (but not analyze it), note that the tarpit doesn’t really do much, and hurts your server as much as theirs. 😉 Keeping connections open longer than needed isn’t a good thing necessarily… 😉

    -d

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘suggestion for handling spammers’ is closed to new replies.