With the recent update to blogengine.net 2.5 and a somewhat renewed interest in blogging I decided to port my Http:BL anti-spam plugin from my old custom blog engine to blogengine.net.

The Http:BL (DNS blacklist) is run by the people at Project Honeypot. Rather than using normal HTTP requests like Akismet, Stopforumspam, and others it instead uses a DNS query to determine whether a given IP address is considered spam or not. (If you're interested in how the query works, you can check out the API, it's pretty well documented.) With my previous engine, about 80% of the blocked spam was blocked by Http:BL so I am hoping that this plugin will work as well as it used to. Once I've confirmed it works and there aren't any bugs I plan on packaging it up and putting it on the new blogengine.net gallery.

If you would like to try it out now, just sign up for an API key, download the extension, and place it in the App_Code\Extensions directory of your site, enable and configure it and you should be good to go.