I was thinking about alternative ways to block comment spam the other day and it occurred to me that there’s potentially a simpler solution than the Invisible Captcha approach I wrote about.

The Invisible Captcha control plays upon the fact that most comment spam bots don’t evaluate javascript. However there’s another particular behavioral trait that bots have that can be exploited due to the bots inability to support another browser facility.

honeypot image from http://www.cs.vu.nl/\~herbertb/misc/shelia/ You see, comment spam bots love form fields. When they encounter a form field, they go into a berserker frenzy (+2 to strength, +2 hp per level, etc…) trying to fill out each and every field. It’s like watching someone toss meat to piranhas.

At the same time, spam bots tend to ignore CSS. For example, if you use CSS to hide a form field (especially via CSS in a separate file), they have a really hard time knowing that the field is not supposed to be visible.

To exploit this, you can create a honeypot form field that should be left blankand then use CSS to hide it from human users, but not bots. When the form is submitted, you check to make sure the value of that form field is blank. For example, I’ll use the form field named body as the honeypot. Assume that the actual body is in another form field named the-real-body or something like that:

<div id="honeypotsome-div">
If you see this, leave this form field blank 
and invest in CSS support.
<input type="text" name="body" value="" />
</div>

Now in your code, you can just check to make sure that the honeypot field is blank…

if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.Form["body"]))
  IgnoreComment();

I think the best thing to do in this case is to act like you’ve accepted the comment, but really just ignore it.

I did a Google search and discovered I’m not the first to come up with this idea. It turns out that Ned Batchelder wrote about honeypots as a comment spam fighting vehicle a while ago. Fortunately I found that post after I wrote the following code.

For you ASP.NET junkies, I wrote a Validator control that encapsulates this honeypot behavior. Just add it to your page like this…

<sbk:HoneypotCaptcha ID="body" ErrorMessage="Doh! You are a bot!"
  runat="server"  />

This control renders a text box and when you call Page.Validate, validation fails if the textbox is not empty.

This control has no display by default by setting the style attribute to display:none. You can override this behavior by setting the UseInlineStyleToHide property to false, which makes you responsible for hiding the control in some other way (for example, by using CSS defined elsewhere). This also provides a handy way to test the validator.

To get your hands on this validator code and see a demo, download the latest Subkismet source from CodePlex. You’ll have to get the code from source control because this is not yet part of any release.