My SMF message board saw a spike in harvesting traffic several weeks ago despite my best efforts to prevent that from happening. The CAPTHCA didn’t let any of spam through but the harvesters were eating bandwidth and server resources. Last week, I took action by hacking the index.php file to use the blacklist function of Project Honeypot. Jan developed a nice WordPress plugin but there was nothing available off the shelf for Simple Machines Forum message board. I took the http:bL query from Jan’s code, inserted my key and put the code at the beginning of the index.php file. When I get a hit from the query, I redirect the harvester to the Honeypot I installed. Took a couple of days but harvesters are being redirected to the Honeypot and my message board is seeing much less traffic.
If you are interested in finding out more about Project Honeypot, click the chicklet on the sidebar of this blog.
