Overview

The SpamHound was born after analysing thousands of spam comments to see what, if any, trends appeared. Then hours were spent kicking ideas round with my business partner [stk] which resulted in several new ideas for detecting spammers. In some ways the SpamHound is very similar to the normal antispam blacklist as it has a list of urls that the blogs have been spammed with before. Apart from that though it reacts very differently. For starters, it never tells a spammer when they've just failed, after all, why warn them that they need to update their methods of attack? (an alternative I've considered is always returning an error so that they always think they've failed). Another major difference is that it's not a "yes/no" answer like the current list, it's more of a "maybe", which is in line with the post/comment karma system that is being coded in to the phoenix version of the software.

The SpamHound also keeps a track of the last time a blacklisted url was used in spam. At a later date I'll be coding in an auto-archive function so that the main list can be restricted to "active" spam urls instead of growing ever longer. This should reduce the cpu load needed to trap spammers, and the archived urls are always available if neccessary.

One of the other ways that the SpamHound is different is the fact that it's not just restricted to checking for blacklisted urls, it also has a few other bits and pieces that it uses to judge whether a visitor is a spammer or not. Soon it wont even be restricted to one blog, or even one server. By having a series of Hounds (should they be called puppies?), spammers can be detected earlier, and the information can be automatically shared between the various Hounds/Puppies.

It's pointless sending me a shedload of requests for this "hack" as I'm not going to be making it publicly available. The only reason for this is the fact that it takes quite a smidge of hacking to make it work in 1.6, whereas it could pretty much be made into a plugin for 1.8+, so I'm going to wait until at least then before I release it. What I will do is release a list of all of the (current) urls in the SpamHounds blacklist and the SpamHound stats on a monthly basis.

I'll say this now though. I would expect every spam url in the SpamHounds list to be in your current b₂evolution blacklist already (if not then you REALLY need to add them). Pretty much the only difference between the SpamHounds blacklist and b₂evolutions blacklist is the number of urls. As I mentioned before, the current blacklist has about 4,400 urls in it, whereas the SpamHound has less than 400, and several of these could be archived already.

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