I suppose I don’t care very much about which BigCorp produces it. They are all big, they are all corps.

And now to the more pressing problem: I’ve googled for over a month now trying to find some place to actually start learning some useful stuff to do with Django. So far, no luck. Lots of blogs and tutorials about trivial things, many people asking the same questions I have, and loads of tutorials that are either outdated, don’t work or don’t do what I want them to do.

I took a quick look at some Django book I found (www.djangobook.org or whatever) – assuming it’s the same one you mentioned – and it really didn’t explain half the things I wanted to find. If someone can recommend something better, I’m all ears.

I need to find some information about how (and why/when) to use separate apps to actually use them as building blocks for my various projects, how I can get them to interact (been through 2-3 different examples, none of them actually work), and most of all – how do I take advantage of the nice widgets already present in the admin site? Why should I write another calendar popup when I know django already has one! I’ve tried dozens of examples, comments, instructions and none of them have actually provided me with a working example – short of actually finding and copying all of the code from some obscure folder deep in the bowels of Django.

I’m still at a point I was a year ago: I do all of my actual production code on PHP because I simply can’t get Django to do even the simple things I want it to do in a way that would actually make any sense to me. I could do it the hard way, but that’s not why I wanted to use Django in the first place.

I did learn and actually complete on production project with Ruby on Rails during this time. It works, it was simple and easy (basically I ported over 2 months’ worth of work on PHP code to RoR in a weekend and it works better than the original), but I never want to touch that steaming pile of turd again. System that breaks the second you update anything on the machine is not production-ready. Nor is something where the syntax changes in a thousand little places with 0.0.1 version upgrade. I haven’t dared to touch the machine after I put it online (after the first disastrous update), and was hoping to port it to Django and get rid of RoR for good, but … oh well. Maybe I should just go back to PHP and know It Just Works.

There isn’t much support for ASP/.Net users as of this date.
But, if you ask in the forums or search you’ll find other sites offering scripts that will work with some of the older forums like Snitz 2000.

Overall it’s a great group and it’s nice to see the creator of the project actually participates and is active within the forums.

On a side note: It’s not that important to store last years data on spammers due to the fact most change formats (ip,email,user) on a weekly and daily bases.

The key to the success of StopForumSpam.Com is actually it’s members that supply “Hot” first seen reports.
Spam one in the group and that’s it!

Search the forums to find your setup and Ask Questions!

They have a web and a dnsbl api and here are their current stats from today:
Trap Addresses Monitored
46,233,975
Trap Monitoring Capability
365,755,000,000
Spam Servers Identified
66,506,238
IPs Monitored
68,001,310
Harvesters Identified
81,103
Dictionary Attackers
10,403,460
Comment Spammers
312,528

They are a community supported project and are always looking for people to install their honeypot software on their websites and to donate subdomains to serve as email server honeypots.

More info on how to help the project out here: http://projecthoneypot.org/faq.php