Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Contact form spam elimination

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 12-24-2016, 04:10 PM:

As everyone who has "contact us" forms on their website knows, there are plenty of spambots that go around filling out those forms. Recently I got a sudden uptick in the amount of spam that I was getting through my form, so I did a bit of Google searching and found a effective way to get rid of that.

Add a hidden field to your form. Spambots just blindly fill out all of the fields that they can find, so they'll fill out the hidden field.

Check for content in that field when you process the form. You can have your mailing script do that, or you can do it with your mail processing script or even your mail client. If the hidden field has content, it's spam. If not, it's legitimate.

I haven't seen any (zero, none) incoming spam through my contact forms since I set this up. What a nice change.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 12-27-2016, 04:19 PM:

Need to add the "capsha" block where a code has to be manually put in.

This eliminates the 'bots.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 12-27-2016, 04:28 PM:

I created a capcha like process on my site to prevent this. I used a bunch of pictures of house numbers and the user has to enter the number before it can be submitted.

Another tip is if you display a phone number or email address, put it in an image and place the image where the number or email is supposed to be displayed. We used to have a problem with people calling our customer service number asking for show times (rather than our recording line). We realized the issue was phones were capturing this number rather than our recording line. Once I changed the pages so the customer service number was in a graphic, these calls dropped to almost zero. I also listed our recording number as a link which made it easier for phones to dial.