[wp-hackers] Introducing a blog/referer spam defense tool...

[Bob Apthorpe]

Hi,

I've developed a web access policy manager (blacklister) to defend 
against referrer and blog comment spam and other forms of web service abuse.

In addition to the original Apache combined log import filter, I've 
added Wordpress v1.5 and Movable Type v2.661 support which should 
provide other blog developers and hackers ample opportunity to create 
their own import filters.

It is completely functional and can publish policies (blacklists) as 
text files, optimized regular expressions (PCRE), RSS feeds, rbldnsd 
zone files, and iptables firewall rulesets.

The source code, documentation, and all that is at 
<http://www.austinimprov.com/~apthorpe/code/policy_manager/>

The code is in very good shape for installation, testing, and 
development. The API is fully documented through the miracle of 
phpDocumentor (http://www.phpdoc.org/), and the web pages are all 
template-generated through the miracle of Smarty 
(http://smarty.php.net/), so I believe the underlying code is fairly 
developer-friendly. The INSTALL file is about as complete as I could 
make it without sending a sysadmin to your doorstep. It's by no means a 
one-click install but I've tried to list the expected skills and 
software dependencies so there shouldn't be too many surprises.

I'm looking for a few developers to help me with this project,
preferably people comfortable with databases (MySQL & cross-db
portability a plus), people comfortable with PHP and perl (I'm using
Smarty templates because I like a clean separation between analysis and
presentation), and people really interested in reputation/trust
management systems and anonymous secure P2P systems. Building a
private blacklist is only the tip of the iceberg...

The most pressing needs are a catchy name and a good OSI-compatible 
license. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks much,

-- Bob
<apthorpe+policymgr at cynistar.net>