Make your site anti-bot?

Question

I remember a site closed due to misuse and i wonder if bots have a part of it. If the bot is POSTing something to my site what are ways i can combat it? I was thinking of setting some cookies and having the cookies changed via javascript + timestamp and sign (so yesterdays cookies cant be used today and next week).

I'm sure most people/bots would just use another site instead of enabling JS in their bot.

What else can i do? I'm thinking daily POST limit and a honeypot for generic bots who just randomly post spam

Answer 1

If you want to get fancy, you can combine a honeypot with IP bans. Anyone who posts to your honeypot gets their IP stuck in /etc/hosts.deny or similar for the next N days.

Answer 2

The most popular method to prevent abuse by bots currently is CAPTCHA. It tends to work pretty well for most bots, since computers can't read very well yet. A slight downside is that some people (myself included) don't like having to constantly prove they're not bots. But it's one of the very few common ways of preventing abuse that's not trivial to defeat, if implemented properly.

There are CAPTCHA plugins for most blog, wiki and e-commerce frameworks.

Answer 3

You could also look into akismet: http://akismet.com/faq/

It offers spam detection services.