Winning the Battle Against Spam

The Problem

Recent blogs running on Koobiya (our hone-grown CMS) suffered major attacks from spam-bots. Akismet, for the most part was doing a good job of detecting the bots, but spam was still seeping through the cracks. The bots were finding all available forms on the sites and attacking them.

The Solution

Enter Project HoneyPot. I was recommended this site on Twitter, and soon fell in love with it. It allows you to lookup visitor IPs on their public blacklist. Project Honeypot also gives it's members the ability to setup bot-traps on their sites, which help them realize new spammer IPs.

So here is the solution:

1. Check if the visitor IP is blacklisted on HoneyPot
2. If blacklisted, show reCaptcha form
   1. If reCaptcha valid check with Akismet
3. If not blacklisted, check with Akismet
4. All clear, post comment

The Win!

You may be wondering why I don't use a Captcha form by default. This is because they are a serious pain to the legitimate site visitor. The purpose is to make it painless for legitimate users to interact, while making it hell on earth for spammers.

This solution has been in place only for a couple of weeks at the time of writing this post, so it's a bit too early to tell how successful it is. However, since it's been implemented I've had absolutely no spam going through undetected. So while the war rages on, this battle is won!