zenHttpbl released!
What is it?
zenHttpbl is a spambot/harvester blocking tool. zenHttpbl is a Zenphoto plug-in implementation of Project Honey Pot's HTTP:BL system. Sounds neat right? Let me guess, you have no clue what I'm talking about. Keep reading...
Q. What is Project Honey Pot and why would I want to use the HTTP:BL system?
A. For the best description about what Project Honey Pot does I'll simply provide this link to their About Page and give you an excerpt:
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.
Pretty nifty right? But that's not all.. Imagine if one of the spambots or harvesters browsed on over to your gallery... Wouldn't it be amazing to simply stop their traffic? Instead of wasting precious bandwidth just simply shut them down? That's where the HTTP:BL system comes in. From the HTTP:BL about page:
The HTTP Blacklist, or "http:BL", is a system that allows website administrators to take advantage of the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep suspicious and malicious web robots off their sites. Project Honey Pot tracks harvesters, comment spammers, and other suspicious visitors to websites. Http:BL makes this data available to any member of Project Honey Pot in an easy and efficient way.
So... what I have done is written an plug-in implementation of the HTTP:BL API system for ease of use with Zenphoto. You simply upload, enable, set your options and enjoy a spamfree site. There's obviously a more technical explanation of it, but do you want that? Or do you just want to cut the spam? So what are we waiting for, right?
Technical Tidbits
zenHttpbl utilizes Project Honey Pot's HTTP:BL service to stop spammers, harvesters, and comment spammers in their tracks. By utilizing the HTTP:BL API and making a DNS query to the PHP servers you are given information categorizing an IP from tracking records, identifying if that IP has been part of any suspicious or malicious activity.
This implementation does all this before serving any web pages, and then (if the visitor passes the thresholds you set via options) either redirects to a honey pot, or serves a blank page. Saving you traffic, and dramatically reducing annoying comment/content spammers.
Info/Demo/Download
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