Bot-Away v1.2 Released

Bot-Away is a Ruby gem designed to prevent Web bots from spamming the forms on your Rails-based site without forcing you to resort to intrusive CAPTCHA fields. It employs a variety of techniques in an attempt to find a programmatic solution to the problem of automated spambots.

Among other new features, v1.2 introduces support for Ruby on Rails 3.0. The minimum supported version of Rails is still 2.3.5.

You can find the specifics, including installation and optional configuration instructions, at the repository location:

NOTE: My standard disclaimer is that since we're using machines to filter machines, any technique employed by Bot-Away is at least feasibly counterable; however, automated bots are generally very stupid and lack functionality necessary to do so. In practice, I've been using Bot-Away to guard the feedback sections of my blog for about 8 months now and not yet seen it defeated.

-Colin MacKenzie IV http://thoughtsincomputation.com @sinisterchipmnk