form spam

blazingsaddles

Hi, does anyone know the best way to prevent or stop form spam?thanks

HandWS LTD

By using a captcha (an image to verify the form with hidden email) or by encoding your email address that is visable to your viewers eyes.

Eoin

Be careful with CAPTCHA though, some of the images that are generated are a pain to read and can piss off people. If using CAPTCHA could turn off potential customers, then I'd think twice about it.

Most spam bots tend to populate all values in a form, to make sure that all required form fields are populated, and therefore there won't be any validation errors.

So you could create a hidden form field that should never be populated. When your form is submitted, you check to see if that field has a value. If it does, then it's spam as a normal user would never have the opportunity to enter a value there.

Now, I'm not sure if the field needs to be a standard hidden form field, or if you need to use CSS to hide it. If it's the latter, then you'd want to consider what would happen if a user with no or limited CSS support is using the page.

tricky D

eoin wrote: »

So you could create a hidden form field that should never be populated. When your form is submitted, you check to see if that field has a value. If it does, then it's spam as a normal user would never have the opportunity to enter a value there.

Now, I'm not sure if the field needs to be a standard hidden form field, or if you need to use CSS to hide it. If it's the latter, then you'd want to consider what would happen if a user with no or limited CSS support is using the page.

Remember to set the tabindex to skip as required, if you care enough about that.

Eoin

Good point, and also make sure it doesn't have a common name and/or ID that a form completer toolbar might automatically populate.

HandWS LTD

There are problems with captcha. However, there is a good free one online that also has 2 other option's. 1) get a new image and 2) hear the words (for blind people). And come with a validated script, recaptcha.net.

When i first did my forms i avoided captcha for those reasons described in the above posts. But with recaptcha.net it is a much better option if you want to have captcha.