Red Herring forms

The honeypot links and red herring forms worked well. They were a pain because they broke many themes. I am working on a honeypot widget that can be installed and put the forms back on the web pages without breaking them.

The big difference that causes spam to slip through is many customers are being served by cloudflare and don’t even know it. The plugin checks for cloudflare and ignores any attempts coming through. It looks like I might have to add the functionality of the cloudflare plugin where customers don’t install it themselves.

Keith

I finished the Red Herring Form Add-on and I am checking it.

I have already stopped 6 Chinese spam attempts and it has only been running for a minute or two. I will put it on the beta test page tomorrow if it doesn’t crash anything over night.

Keith

Your site gives me “Invalid Plugin Request” errors for any beta plugin. What gives?

I changed the script. It turns out it had problems with my sloppy javascript in IE. I hate IE.

Keith

Javascript? Heh, that figures. Why would I expect anyone to provide download links with javascript? Of course, javascript is switched off, as it should be, in my browser ??

I had problems with robots downloading the plugins.

I made it a form with javascript doing the submit so that the spiders would not cost me any more bandwidth.

Keith

Okay, I set it up, the forms are generated, let’s see what it will bring. Thanks.

On BlogsEye.com: Out of 1,784 spammers since 2/27. 585 were stopped by red herring forms. These probably would have been stopped by another check, but it is nice to see how stupid the spammer code is.

The other 1200 or so were largely admin password guessing attempts.

I have to find a way to block wp-login with admin as an id using htaccess. I don’t need the bandwidth.

Keith

Yep. Works nicely, a steadily increasing number of blocked spammers. Thanks!