stop unauthorised form completion

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
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Guest

I have a form for prospective clients to fill in and submit to us. I am
being inundated with spam with completes every field in the form. How can i
add a field that a user has to enter the code to validate the form submission
or better yet, how can i stop these spam emails.
 
Not possible with the std FP forms handler
You would need a 3rd party server side technique like CAPTCHA
See http://www.captcha.net/


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SBR @ ENJOY (-: [ Microsoft MVP - FrontPage ]
"Warning - Using the F1 Key will not break anything!" (-;
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|I have a form for prospective clients to fill in and submit to us. I am
| being inundated with spam with completes every field in the form. How can i
| add a field that a user has to enter the code to validate the form submission
| or better yet, how can i stop these spam emails.
 
To stop the spam altogether, use server side scripting to process the
form. The email address(es) the form is sent to should never be visible
in any pages in the web site, but hard coded in the script.

To ensure the form is completed by a Human, use a Captcha or similar.

For more information on Captcha, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

You could also ask simple questions in the form such as "What colour is
a blue sky" and test the response.

Validating the Captcha (or equivalent) field client side using
JavaScript is not worth the effort - in my experience spam bots do not
use JavaScript.
--
Ron Symonds - Microsoft MVP (FrontPage)
Reply only to group - emails will be deleted unread.

http://www.rxs-enterprises.org/fp

FrontPage Support: http://www.frontpagemvps.com/
 
Aside from changing the form handler, you can do it the poor-man's way.

Rename the form file (the bots won't be able to find it for a while)

Rename ALL of your fields to something other than "email" "comments" etc.

Re-word data in the form to avoid those terms too.

I THINK what happens is some robot spider finds these, sends a tip to a
user, who then keys in the form data, and makes it available to a zombie
network, which just uses the data to "POST" to the form without looking at
it. (You can see this if you look in your logs.)

If you avoid the word "Commment" the robots don't find the form again as
fast, and you can stop the spam for a while. (Usually weeks to months.) If
they find it again, rename it again.
 
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