Honeypot technique not filtering Spam

Have you tried using the honeypot method to filter out spam but still spam is finding its way through to you site?

The honeypot spam filter technique is a work around for recaptcha, an option that can be annoying to users and degrade the user experience.

With the honeypot method on the other hand, users will not even notice its existence.

I did a project for a client who was being bombarded by spam, I mean tens of spam messages every hour. My assignment was to ensure that only legit emails made their way into his inbox.

On my first attempt, I added a honeypot field as shown in the screenshot below.

This solution only worked for spam bots shown in the screen shot below.

Note that the bot above indiscriminately populates all fields, which makes it easier to 'arrest it'. It easily fell for the 'business' honeypot. 

However, there are some selective spam bots, as shown in the shot below. These spam bots only populate the common fields but ignore the uncommon fields. 

I made an important discovery. Most, in fact all the spam bots populate the 'name' and 'email' fields.

I therefore used the field 'name' as the honeypot, and guess what? I managed to filter out all the spam messages so far, those generated by bots of course. Though I have not encountered it yet, human spam can easily bypass the honeypot technique.

What are your views? Please leave a comment below.

Web Pages folder overlaps Project folder

Creating a new web application project using Netbeans can be difficult sometimes, when the knowledge of the folder structure is not on one's finger tips.

A common error that may arise at the final stage is of the project creation is --> Web Pages folder overlaps Project folder.

To solve this issue, use the following simple steps.

1. Inside the project folder, create a folder called web.
2. Move the sources and the WEB-INF file into the web directory.

You are good to go! When you create the project now from the existing sources, the process will be seamless!

Happy coding! For corrections or questions, comment below.

Download interrupted: Connection to https://dl-ssl.google.com refused

ADT bundle is very convenient for Android developers, as it comes with everything off the shelf to start developing an android app.

When you download the Android ADT bundle, it only comes (as of November 2013 )with Android 4.4 (API 19) and so you cannot develop for lower versions of Android.

Updating the package may be needed and so when you click on the Android SDK manager icon, you get the download icon. 

When you check on the check boxes for the API(s), to download, and click install package, the needed packages should be downloaded and installed, but in some instances, it may not download and returns the message "Download interrupted: Connection to https://dl-ssl.google.com refused", "Done. Nothing was installed."

To solve this issue,

Click on tools --> options and a dialog for setting proxy appears. Set the proxy to the current network and click close.

That should solve your issues! If you have any questions, just comment below.