Make Money With a Black Hat Honeypot

Instead of trying to fight forum, blog and wiki spam it finally dawned on me that I was taking the wrong approach, don't fight the Black Hat spammers, monetize them!

The basic concept is built around the black hat spammers love of spamming so the first thing you need to do is set up a bunch of fake forums, blogs and wiki's using the popular open source software that the spammers love most. The trick is NOT to install any form of spam controls whatsoever, no captcha, no Askimet, nothing that will slow the spammer down. Let the spammers go wild with your honeypot site and let them make fake profiles, create spam threads and comments, it doesn't matter because we call all this spam "content" for this purpose.

For those advanced webmasters, take a look at some automatic content creation techniques that you can use to prime the honeypot sites with hundreds of bogus threads and blog posts of gibberish. This will trick the spammers into thinking you have a popular site where there will be lots of eyeballs looking at their spam yet nothing could be further from the truth as nobody will ever see their spam. If you want to be truly creative, use the text jumble or synonym switch on each spammers post to avoid duplicate content and also avoid matching their spam footprint which could be easily detected.

Right about now you must be asking yourself:
"Why in the hell would I build a site designed to be spammed?"

The answer is simple, the spam will become your content and hopefully your honeypot sites will pick up some traffic from the search engines. Best of all, the spammers will keep hitting your site daily so you'll have fresh content and we know how the search engines just love fresh content.

Once you get this traffic from the search engine, simply redirect that traffic to the appropriate affiliate landing page based on the search keyword and VOILA! you start making sales and the free money starts rolling in with the spammers doing all the work.

So there you have a simple yet elegant solution in one neat little bundle to let spammers make you money while you screw them over wasting their time spamming your honeypot sites.

Enjoy.

Very Bad Behavior for Crashed Joomla! Sites

Which is worse, a little spam or being offline for a month?

A major example shown below is because the bot blocker can crash the whole site and this poor webmaster has been in this state at a minimum, according to Google cache, since "retrieved on Jan 24, 2008". However, Live says the same site has been this way since "our crawler examined the site on 1/11/2008", so it's much worse.

Then I found another site down all month as Google cache shows "retrieved on Jan 2, 2008" so they've not only had anti-spam but anti-visitor as well, nothing to worry about.

Warning: botbehavior_bot() [function.botbehavior-bot]: SAFE MODE Restriction in effect. The script whose uid is 3647 is not allowed to access /home/xxx/public_html/mambots/system/bad-behavior/bad-behavior-joomla.php owned by uid 80 in /home/xxx/public_html/mambots/system/bb2_bot.php22

Warning:botbehavior_bot(/home/xxx/public_html/mambots/system/bad-behavior/bad-behavior-joomla.php) [function.botbehavior-bot]: failed to open stream: Unknown error: 0 in /home/xxx/public_html/mambots/system/bb2_bot.php on line 22

Fatal error: botbehavior_bot() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/home/xxx/public_html/mambots/system/bad-behavior/bad-behavior-joomla.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php-4.4.7/lib/php') in /home/xxx/public_html/mambots/system/bb2_bot.php on line 22

Looked around the web and there are other Joomla! sites with similar issues as well which weren't completely fatal. I'm not sure why a few sites just crashed with the errors while others proceeded to display errors with page content.

All I can say is that these webmasters need a good site monitoring alarm service at a minimum.