--- title: Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically | daily.dev description: A honeypot trap called B6 cut bot traffic to a hobby site by over 80%. Terence Eden built it after OpenBenches.org transferred more than 2.5TB of data in a... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/blunt-banhammer-blocks-basic-bots-ballistically-iosdpdn4w twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically | daily.dev og:description: A honeypot trap called B6 cut bot traffic to a hobby site by over 80%. Terence Eden built it after OpenBenches.org transferred more than 2.5TB of data in a... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/blunt-banhammer-blocks-basic-bots-ballistically-iosdpdn4w og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/IOsDPdN4W.png og:image:alt: Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically **[Terence Eden](https://daily.dev/sources/shkspr)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A honeypot trap called B6 cut bot traffic to a hobby site by over 80%. Terence Eden built it after OpenBenches.org transferred more than 2.5TB of data in a month, and it looks like AI bots crawling the data. The tool hides a disallowed link on every page; any visitor that follows it gets its IP written into .htaccess and banned from the site. After a week it had blocked over 400 IP addresses, cutting peak daily transfer from 216GB to around 25GB. It's loosely inspired by Jeff Starr's Blackhole, and the author asks that it be treated as AGPL v3 licensed. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How do I build a honeypot trap in PHP and .htaccess to permanently ban scraper bots? Create a /honeypot/ directory disallowed in robots.txt, add a hidden link to it (aria-hidden, zero-width text, CSS display:none) on every page, and run an index.php there that writes the visitor's IP into a BLOCKED IPs block in .htaccess using a RewriteCond rule, so the server returns an error on every future request from that IP. _Developers fighting AI scrapers can compare bot-blocking approaches like this one on daily.dev._ ### How effective is a honeypot-based bot ban compared to just blocking by user agent or rate limiting? One implementation blocked over 400 IP addresses within a week and cut a site's peak daily data transfer from 216GB to about 25GB, an over 80% reduction in bot traffic. It claims no false positives, since a hidden link can't be clicked by a normal user and a well-behaved bot won't follow a robots.txt-disallowed path, unlike user-agent or header-based heuristics which produce some false positives. _Anyone weighing bot-mitigation tactics can track real-world results like these on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [How to Block Bots from Visiting Your Website](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-block-bots-from-visiting-your-website-p1xwarvet) · Pragmatic Pineapple · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Internet Is No Longer A Safe Haven](https://daily.dev/posts/the-internet-is-no-longer-a-safe-haven-jkd43dgby) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 1 comments - [Publishers say no to AI scrapers, block bots at server level](https://daily.dev/posts/publishers-say-no-to-ai-scrapers-block-bots-at-server-level-nite7hp90) · The Register · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers](https://daily.dev/posts/guarding-my-git-forge-against-ai-scrapers-5gzatzl2f) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The web belongs to the machines now](https://daily.dev/posts/the-web-belongs-to-the-machines-now-oylvpdhmh) · TechCentral · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#php](https://daily.dev/tags/php), [#crawling](https://daily.dev/tags/crawling) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/blunt-banhammer-blocks-basic-bots-ballistically-iosdpdn4w) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/blunt-banhammer-blocks-basic-bots-ballistically-iosdpdn4w","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/blunt-banhammer-blocks-basic-bots-ballistically-iosdpdn4w"},"datePublished":"2026-11-09T12:35:26.001Z","dateModified":"2026-11-09T12:35:56.875Z","description":"A honeypot trap called B6 cut bot traffic to a hobby site by over 80%. 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