I’ve been wondering about this…
I am looking at Project Honeypot, which attempts to catch spammers and harvesters (bots) by the IP address as they visit your site and prevent them before they see any content. It looks tempting to utilize as a web geek, since I get loads of comment spam and even contact form spam.
Perusing the WordPress plugins database, I found the http:BL WordPress plugin to make it easy to implement Project Honeypot.
I signed up really quickly, FireFTP’d the plugin (nice and small) to both my WordPress install I use with my kids and this blog.
What I am wondering about is that this means if you visit my site, your IP address will be checked against a database. I did not enable logging, so I am not going to see everyone’s IP. It only checks them against the database that renews every 14 days.
Is this a privacy thing? Or is this type of protection permissable given the amazingly rough Spam attacks I’ve been getting?
I don’t think it’s a privacy issue, since if we don’t send IP addresses to the web sites we visit it’s kind of difficult to get any content back. If I write a letter to someone and put my return address on the envelope, I understand that they’ll know my address. Otherwise, how will they write back?
At least, that’s my opinion.
In a world of transparency and accountability to Him do we care if you see our IP addresses? I don’t.
Funny you mention the spam attacks recently. I’ve been hit with a spat of spam on edublogs as of late as well. It’s not as bad as it was last fall, but I’m not averaging about 3 to 4 a week over the last 2 weeks. I find that any way to reduce this pain would be highly beneficial to all involved.