The Cottage Smallholder

That's a good question, BS, and surprisingly few people have asked.

Automated spam systems can spew out millions of spam posts per hour, both the email guff that we are all familiar with, and also spam comments on blogs and forums like ours. We have known good blogs that were forced to shut down because of the sheer volume of spam comments that promote everything from Viagra to . . . well, you can imagine.

This also drains our server resources and slows down the site's responsiveness.

Bad Behaviour is a fantastic piece of free software that looks at the technical characteristics of the enquirer (that could be you, browsing to this site) and runs a checklist against the good and bad attributes of your enquiry. For the vast majority of normal human visitors, all tests are passed. But the spam bots mostly display certain technical features that betray them as spam machines.

Bad Behaviour simply denies them access. Complicated technology, but a simple result.

We used to receive about 7,000 of these spam posts per week and it was a nightmare to deal with. Nowadays only 3 per month get through. Bad Behaviour's presence has prompted the spammers to move on to other more vulnerable sites. Hence the much reduced figure of 1,442 automatically detected and denied access in the past week