mad.ly rails, jquery, flash, etc    about »

Honeypot filter as a Rack middleware

Our site’s suggestion box got hammered by a spambot recently, so I created this simple Rack middleware to protect our app from any requests that include a honeypot field:

Been using this in production for a few days; seems to work well. Interested in hearing comments on this technique.

Thanks to Zach Zolton for the idea, and to Trevor Turk for adding documentation.

[...] Honeypot filter as a Rack middleware Our site’s suggestion box got hammered by a spambot recently, so I created this simple Rack middleware to protect our app from any requests that include a honeypot field. [...]

Could the line;
<div class=”something_unique_to_your_app”>

be changed to
<div class=”<%= HONEYPOT_FIELD_NAME %>”>

to make it more DRY?

(third time’s a charm)

Would it make sense to block the ip address once the spammer tried to post to the honeypot field? or would that be too harsh?