boum

I have released "Spambot's bowl" today. This is a highly configurable MOS module which generates nonsense email addresses for spambots. The use of this module will make a site much less attractive for email harvesters due to a large load of non-working addresses.

Find the module on MOSforge http://mosforge.net/projects/spambowl/
or visit my homepage http://spambowl.boumchalak.net (where you can also see the module in action).

I have no knowledge of bugs or problems, it should run with every 4.5 version, however, I have classified it as "beta" just in case anyone encounters a problem. If you like the module and use it on your site, I'd love to hear from you!

jeroen

Wow i just love this module

Is it possible for this module to be invissible for human visitors and still work for bots?

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boum

Hehe... sorry for the confusion. There has been some discussion on this thread. If I find some time, I will try to release a new version with an invisibility option this evening.

boum

Ok, folx...

I've just released version 1.1 featuring 2 new parameters which should cover the ideas discussed here and here:

• invisible: makes the addresses invisible and disables the intro text
• style: creates a <span> of a predefined (in your template) css class

So go here: http://mosforge.net/projects/spambowl/
or there: http://spambowl.boumchalak.net

Hans

What makes you think putting a large load of non-working adresses will make your site less attractive to email harvesters? Those bots do only one thing, collect email adresses. They do not check if they are valid. It is even possible, bots will return in future to your site because your site is such a large resource of addresses, resulting in more bandwith.

jomaco1

Excellent idea! Looking forward to checking this out!

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Mark

Arthur...congrats on the rebuild! Hope it stays clean.

Click HERE to view signature. (If nothing happens at first...keep clicking)

boum

I don't think that the spambots themselves have an opinion on my site, however, the (presumable) spammer might at some point.
If you take a look at those programs, most are either plain spiders or spiced with a keyword search possibility. The only thing which IMHO (sorry, I also have never tried one of those...) might "bias" their spidering behavior is the jerk using it. And if he's getting sick of getting his nice address collection spoiled each time he visits one of those MOS sites, it's fine with me. Since they only spider the HTML part of my site, and not the images and "heavy" stuff, I do love to watch them visit my site since I'm really pissed off by all the crap that hits my mailboxes each day. It's of course a question of bandwidth you like to "donate" for this...