Perl can't save the world (well, maybe...) but it can help stop spammers. I've written a generalized webpage and email faker: Spider Catcher. Simply, the tool generates faked web pages, based on a user defined template, containing peppered bogus emails. The trick is to get the script to link to itself under a different link, trapping a harvesting spider. To be fair to legitimate search engine spiders, the catcher can be modified in the future to respond differently to various user-agents.

It uses Markov chains and a babelizer to generate semi-coherent content from arbitrary input text. The code is downloadable on the page itself.

I can imagine this would make an impact on the spammers' databases if a large number of webmasters implemented this.

I got the idea for it from the IMDB's harvest pages.

Edit: chipmunk 2001-06-18

In reply to Spider-catcher: anti-spam measures for email harvesters by Anonymous Monk

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