As you surely noticed already a few weeks ago, Project Honey Pot announced that they’re now also tracking Comment Spammers. And they’re doing it quite successfully, the current rate of newly catched spammers is around 100 per day. Part of the success is for sure the the http:BL Plugin for WordPress, which can be grabbed here. Which made http:BL more known, and in order to use this Plugin you need a Project Honey Pot Account and if you have an account it’s not much work to get your own Honey Pot.
http:BL the success
Many users from http:BL WP Plugin reported that their daily Spam value dropped dramatically from 100 and above, to just a handful Spam Comments per day, some also report that they don’t receive any Spam at all after setting up this Plugin and Service.
For myself I got some similar figure but not too successful at all, my Spam count is still around 15-20 per day, but the amount dropped around 66%.
Remedy
After just a short time delay, new Spammer IPs will be caught and everyone who uses the http:BL Plugin profits from it, as the service(-Plugin) will block the attempts. So your Website will not receive any Spam and also the traffic, to the site can be lowered, for some heavy traffic pages it will have a big affect and will be a real mercy. One of the main aims is further to reach some Level of Informations about some Spammer/Bot Networks to start lawsuits against them.
That could lower the amount of daily Spam, although it’s a long and hard way to this date. So some day, we can live without Spamming at all. It’s our remedy!
Painkiller
The other facts are: Much Spam is coming from Zombie Computers, and these are just the PCs of poor unsuspecting Internet Users. Which behave just like normal PC Users, who gets everytime he logs into the internet another IP.
http:BL only logs and blocks the exact spammy IP, and after a few days of no Spam from this IP it’s supposed to be clean. So if a Zombie enters the Internet, he mostly gets an innocent IP, the user stays connected for some time and sends 10 Spam posts(without his knowledge), where 3 off them reach the Blog. The IP is now blocked…but not the next time he connects to the Internet, he will be mostly innocent again…and there are millions of Zombies out. Now just imagine that this problem just gets even bigger when IPv6 makes it way into the wide world.
http:BL is just a painkiller which makes it liveable with Spam, at least for Users which use http:BL.
From Painkiller to remedy
You see there are some easy to see positive effects, but these alone will not stop Spam at all. To succeed the competition against spam, we need a world wide Anti Spam Act, which enables it from everywhere in the world to start a lawsuit against Spammer and that they can nowhere hide, any more. As well it’s important to make the Internet Users more awake to keep Anti-Virus and -Malware Applications up to date, to not end as Zombie. As well as the use of http:BL or similar tools need to be spread to a wide range of websites to make it gainless for Spammer to Spam, also if they’re using just Zombies, as the risk to be catched is too high.
Conclusion
It’s possible to get the Web mostly Spam free, but it will take much work, and not from just a handful Website owner, to achieve it. Mostly it will be that we have to use some protections for ever, as the less we try to fight them the more Spam will be. Equal what will happen, to successful fight Spam, now, you need to participate to http:BL or similar projects. Together we can stand Spam.