Version 2.0 of Bot-Away has been released.
Once added to a project, Bot-Away silently, unobtrusively works to prevent submissions by spambots on your Rails application. It employs a variety of techniques to bewilder automated spam bots, and hooks into the ActionDispatch middleware to validate the data being sent.
Bot-Away makes the assumption that a human user should never have to "prove they're human" because that is both frustrating and demeaning to the honest customer. Bot-Away instead reverses this role, placing the burden of proof squarely upon the shoulders of the automated spam bot.
Bot-Away v1.2 will still receive bugfixes and is compatible with Rails v2.3.x, but is no longer under active development. Version 2.0 is the best candidate for use within Rails 3 applications and includes some significant new features.
For much more information, including the changelog, please visit:
A note on Bot-Away's Reliability:
I've been using this gem on my Rails-based blog since early 2010 and have yet to receive a single spam comment. Not one. On the other hand, my other, non-Rails-based blog has only been live for a few months and gets dozens of spam comments every day...
