The idea isn't new: Spambots can waste an awful lot of time and resources if they fall into an endless cycle of randomly generated email addresses. This is intended to be a better mousetrap. In most current scripts that generate random addresses, the only random element is the address. Also, most current implementations of this idea don't do a convincing job of generating random links that appear real (of course, humans and programs may have different ideas about what seems real). It then becomes feasible to build a better mouse: A spambot that can detect formatting patterns that are associated with certain [popular] scripts, and links that are just malformed GET requests. Just about everything in this script's output is random: how much text; how many email addresses; how many links, even how long to wait before serving content. This feature should make it infeasible to detect the output from this script even with smart spambots. If .htaccess is enabled, the links appear to be real static pages. Users are encouraged to modify both the static and dynamic portions of script.
The .htaccess file allows all requests made within that directory to be processed by the index.php script. This makes the randomly generated pages appear as if they're really there. If you install this, click a link, and get a 404 or 403 error, you either need to change the "RewriteBase" line of .htaccess, or the use of .htaccess files is limited on your server: See the README.txt for what to do about it. | |||||