Anti Spam through Honey Pot

• November 13, 2015
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With almost 50% share of all the websites using CMS technologies on entire Internet, WordPress is the most used and popular Content Management System. It is basically a blogging tool and people are using it for their blogs including businesses of all size, celebrities, educational institutes, etc. On average, 17 new posts per second are published and receive 5.5 million comments every month.

With this ratio of comments, there is a significant chance of Comments Spam on posts. Usually, there are automatic programs (BOTS) which create comments spam on website by identifying WordPress form keys. A lot of spam can slow down your blog and Google might block your website for having bad links present in spam comments.

There are many techniques and plugins available to control spamming. The most commonly used plugin is Akismet which is downloaded by default along with WordPress installation. It is not truly effective. Now plugins use a new technique known as Honey Pot which is basically a sweet trap for bots.

Spam Honey Pot:

Spam Honey Pot plugin adds a text area field in comment form and sets its property to display none in CSS. It is invisible for humans (as in browser, it will never display). Bot will read it as a normal field and put some dummy data while posting the comment.

On server side, script checks the honey pot field, if it contains data then the comment will be marked as spam and will never publish it on website. It is quite useful to control the spam comments. It also saves actual users to input nasty captchas for spam controlling.