Spam through Web Forms

We are experiencing major problems with spam being sent through our webform. We have installed a captcha, but it has not solved the problem.

Any ideas as to what else we can do to prevent this from occuring?

what sort of webforum do you use

hi,

An easy solution is to display a graphic and let users input what they see on the grpahics i.e. letters and numbers. This will prevent spam-bots from using your form as human manual internvention will need to be used to use your form.

Webdevelopa, I have already installed a captcha, but it has not seemed to stop the spam.

DanDoughty, pardon me if I misunderstood your post, but it is spam through a web form that has me confused, not a forum. In any event, I used a 3rd party web forms designer to design the current web form on our site.

i meant form not forum lol

About the only thing you can do is implement some measures to ensure that a human is using the form.

Well having installed the captcha, that is pretty much all I can do to prevent it. However I am still receiving spam through the form so I am going to assume that this is being sent by a humanoid of sorts.

Wish I could find the buggers.

Thanks for the replies

Ok, let me make this clear...they already installed a captcha!!

Ok, since you already have a captcha, here is what I would recommend you do.

So what can webmasters do?

• Require registration
• Have active moderators
• Use captchas
• Disallow or flag certain regions via geo-detection
• Use throttle limits

Let me know if you need more detail or did not understand any part.

I set textpattern to moderate comments and when I get spam I mark them as spam, ban the ip and it works lovely. It learns it works, it's happy!

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LOL...

Ok, let me make this clear...He is talking about a FORM!!! NOT A FORUM!!!

I don't know what is on your form, but one thing I've read about is to add another item to the form and call it something standard that bots look for like website or address or email. Whatever works that you don't need and bots love. Then, place some text above it that says "DO NOT FILL THIS OUT". Then, have the process script check the text and if it's anything but blank, don't proceed with sending it. Humans will clearly not fill it out, but bots won't understand and fill it out anyway.

Good luck!

That seems like a awful way to go about it. Just adding extra inputs and labels such as "Don't fill this out" seems a bit off.

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I didn't say it was pretty, but it works.

You can try to hide the item from displaying, but some bots have learned that trick and won't fill them out now.

I guess you could also make it really small and tuck it out of site.

I ran across a site today that had "What is the sum of three and seven?" and an input field after it. Something that simple will work if you use PHP to change the numbers around.

Do you know for sure that the spam is being sent via the form?