> I've seen people report that they have reduced spam to near nothing already with just a honeypot, but of course I can't verify those claims.
Can verify from personal experience. I once implemented a simple honeypot approach on a small blog site. It immediately cut down automated "drive by" comment spam to almost nothing. I never tried to quantify it, but it was the difference between dozens of spam comments a day and maybe one or two a week (which I assumed were probably manual submissions).
Most spam bots are pretty unsophisticated it seems, and do not pay any attention to a honeypot field being hidden either by CSS or JS.
Can verify from personal experience. I once implemented a simple honeypot approach on a small blog site. It immediately cut down automated "drive by" comment spam to almost nothing. I never tried to quantify it, but it was the difference between dozens of spam comments a day and maybe one or two a week (which I assumed were probably manual submissions).
Most spam bots are pretty unsophisticated it seems, and do not pay any attention to a honeypot field being hidden either by CSS or JS.