Via Branko, I hear of Bad Behavior, a
fingerprinting method for HTTP requests, [which] has proven, as one user called it, "shockingly effective" at identifying and blocking malicious activity, including blog/wiki spam, e-mail address harvesting, automated cracking attempts, and more. It does all of this looking only at the HTTP request headers; for POST data, the content of the spam is not analyzed at all.
If you have a Wordpress blog, you probably need this, but it is designed to be easily integrateable into other PHP-based content management systems. If I read the documentation correctly, I could install it now and have it do basic spam-blocking work in Willow, but I prefer to wait until Mithandir has given me his opinion and maybe done whatever tweaks are necessary to make all the functionality cooperate with Willow.
(Mithandir's own motivation for doing this is probably a bit low right now, though - he's vacationing in Norway, and he reports that the amount of spam on his own website has dropped spontaneously over the past few days. So I may change my mind and muck about with the plugin myself. I should be able to stick in an "Include Once" call....)
