Bad Behaviour spambot mod? Or a honeypot system?

[nanaimobar]

From the Homelandstupidity (http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/) site "Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script."

Is this something that might be useful for vBulletin? Anyone want to take a stab at coding a mod for this or maybe the Project Honeypot (http://www.projecthoneypot.org) system?

[Ronin Six]

I'd also love to see this ported to VBulletin. Just have to clarify for those that it's possible to do this without violating your VB license. From Michael at Bad Behavior:

Bad Behavior cannot currently be used with vBulletin due to licensing issues. The vBulletin license is incompatible with open source extensions, thus open source software such as Bad Behavior cannot legally be used to extend vBulletin without a license exemption granted by the copyright holder of the open source software.

Such a license exemption stipulates that the proprietary software is not subject to the open source license governing the extension, and is required to protect the intellectual property rights in the proprietary software. Without such an exemption, it would be impossible to fulfill the requirements of both licenses. Attempting to use Bad Behavior as-is would cause you to violate your vBulletin license.

I am willing to grant a license exemption for code which connects Bad Behavior to vBulletin; I have done so in the past for other proprietary software such as ExpressionEngine. However, since I do not have access to vBulletin code and developer documentation, I am unable to develop the connector myself. If someone were to develop such a connector, then I could grant an exemption to that code, allowing it to legally be used with vBulletin.

[SemperFideles]

I found this guide yesterday and followed the instructions to successfully implement Project Honeypot's HTTP BL for my vBulletin site: http://www.computer-juice.com/forums/f31/auto-block-spambots-vbulletin-using-project-honey-pots-http-bl-22790/

Make sure you register at Project Honeypot to get your own access key.

[Ronin Six]

Thanks for the link SemperFi! :up:

For me, I was able to get Bad Behavior running to a certain extent on my VB install. They provide a small bit of direction on this page:
http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/documentation/porting-guide/

So if you wanted to run it in a degraded mode (no logging), one can simply upload the files onto the site root, then create a new plugin with these settings:
Hook Location: global_start
Plugin PHP Code: require_once ("../bad-behavior-generic.php");

Again, there's no logging, but I've had great success with mine. Spambot registrations are down to a trickle, if not nearly zero.

There's also instructions in the Porting Guide link above for those that want a full install and know how to create the appropriate hooks.

[SemperFideles]

Thanks for the heads up. Is there a significant difference between Bad Behavior and Project Honeypot? My understanding is that Bad Behaviour is a Project Honeypot implementation but I'm uncertain that this is so.

[Ronin Six]

The BB developer definitely participates in the HoneyPot effort, but I think the approach is only part of his whole (and IMHO more thorough) implementation. He suggests running HoneyPot in this link below, so I might just run both to cover all the bases:
http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/2007/04/27/project-honey-pot-and-httpbl/

However, since implementing BB, it's very rare I get spam comments these days since much of the bots are stopped at the door. So not entirely sure how much I would be contributing to the HP effort. I'd say BB is a must, and HP is optional. At least in my limited experience.

[SemperFideles]

Thanks for the link SemperFi! :up:

For me, I was able to get Bad Behavior running to a certain extent on my VB install. They provide a small bit of direction on this page:
http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/documentation/porting-guide/

So if you wanted to run it in a degraded mode (no logging), one can simply upload the files onto the site root, then create a new plugin with these settings:
Hook Location: global_start
Plugin PHP Code: require_once ("../bad-behavior-generic.php");

Again, there's no logging, but I've had great success with mine. Spambot registrations are down to a trickle, if not nearly zero.

There's also instructions in the Porting Guide link above for those that want a full install and know how to create the appropriate hooks.

Just wanted to let you know that I created an Addon for this that implements the above: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=233628