Okay, so you've looked through the Bot Trap...you've clicked a couple of the links, and now you're ready to ask the hard, philosophical questions about it....and here are the answers:

Q:So, umm.....what the hell is that?

A: The bot trap is just a script that generates some random text, random email addresses and some random links back to itself every time you hit it.

Q: Okay. so....why?

A: Well....ummm.....it seemed like a good idea at the time? Actually, this was a concept that a few of the early spam-fighters used to make harvesting email addresses harder for spammers...it looks like this is a great page to harvest email addresses from, since it's got this apparently limitless source of addresses. In fact, they're all fake. The hope was that you'd hopelessly pollute a spammers database with crud, making it unusable. The unfortunate reality is that the spammers bots are smarter than that, and when they aren't smarter than that, the spammers just don't care, since it only costs them fractions of a penny to send a spam.

Q:Great. So this whole thing is totally pointless?

A:Yup.

Q:So where does the text come from?

A: Hehehe. that's actually what made creating this kinda fun. The text is from the first chapter of Machiavelli's "The Prince", but it's not straight. I wrote a program that looked at the text of the first chapter, and worked out the statistical likelihood of any one word following any other word (and of ending a paragraph, etc). Based on those probabilities, the bot trap re-builds the text. So it'll be close to the original, but pretty unlikely to be exactly like it.

Q: That's *really* geeky

A: Thank you.

Q: Has anyone actually fallen for this?

A: I'm not sure. I got one set of weirdos from some ISP in Washington State who were pummeling this thing for about 2 days straight once. (they made about 18,000 requests to the bot trap in that time. sad.)

Q: what did you do about them?

A: I banned their ass...they took my poor webserver up to a load average of about 9. Dorks.