GShttpBL - block bad bots

[morvy]

Hello everybody,

I've made this small plugin, which uses projecthoneypot.org's http:BL service to detect bots (by IP address) and prevents them from crawling the website by showing (custom) 503 error message. From what I tried, it doesn't affect performance of page (not more than 150ms from my tests on first load).

Credits for great & easy to use script that communicates with http:BL API go to Thasmo

How to use this plugin

1. Extract to /plugins directory
   
2. Enable plugin
   
3. Go to Plugins/right panel "GShttpBL settings"
   
4. fill in required fields:
   

• http:BL api-key
  
• "type" of bot - Suspicious, Harvester, Spammer etc.
  
• Threat level
  
• Filtering type
  

Maybe those filtering combinations are useless as you can set Threat level to 255 to skip filtering by threat level, but maybe some people will find it easier to use the plugin this way.
Plugin also logs every IP/visitor type/threat level that was blocked into the log file (accessible from plugin settings).

[joyofweaving.com]

I'm giving this a try as one of my sites keeps getting hit by comment spammers. (I'm using the "Pages & Comments" plug-in). I have Cloudflare since beta and have been using Project Honeypot since before that but I kept getting spammed. I'm testing this out on the site that gets hit all the time. It seems to be working. The log shows a comment spammer that's been caught. So far, so good. Thank you for this. I hope it keeps working because I was tearing my hair out. <3

[joyofweaving.com]

Do you know if this includes IPv6 type IP addresses? Working nicely so far except for an IPv6 type IP address got past it.

[morvy]

Hello, as far as I know, honeypot can work only with IPv4 addresses so that's why IPv6 got past it

PS: thanks for the feedback

[joyofweaving.com]

You're very much welcome. I'm happy to say that a lot of the spam stopped once I blocked Yandex. The rest are stopped by this plug-in with the threat level set to 9. Rarely does one get past that and it won't block good search engines. THANK YOU for saving my sanity!