How do you place anti-bot in "Contact Us"?

[Ram8349]

I am getting spammed from "Contact Us". Lots of irrelevant advertising from botters or real people.

I have no idea how to place the same anti-bot from registration onto "Contact Us" page.

 

What should I do?

[__Darknite]

There are a number of anti-spam techniques, however please keep in mind that nothing is 100% effective:

 

* Honey Pots: place hidden fields above actual fields. Dumb bots usually always fill in the first set of fields they find and post those.

* Page Timers: Humans will never land on a page and submit it immediately. You can put in a 2-3 second rule. As soon as a user lands on the page, start a timer. When they submit, include the timestamp. Any posts that are less than the bot threshold should be discarded.

* Link Counting:any more than two kill it.

* IP Block: have an list of banned IP.

 

There are many other methods, if used as a combo (eg all of the above) this should dramatically reduce the spam.

Edited July 5, 2012 by __Darknite

[Ditzy]

I'm not sure how to help you, since you didn't specify if you coded this by yourself or used some script or CMS. However, in the last case, you should consult your script's/CMS' documentation and get help there or post in their forums if you find nothing. In the first case, I can help you, if you post the code used in the registration and the contact us page.

[Thomas]

Lots of normal things like a Q&A

 

A question you might ask is: Wtire tshi sentence crrectly?

Humans can read words correctly as long as as the first and last letters are correct and all the letters are contained.

[JHTech100]

Lots of normal things like a Q&A

 

A question you might ask is: Wtire tshi sentence crrectly?

Humans can read words correctly as long as as the first and last letters are correct and all the letters are contained.

Okay... I am usually great at reading scrambled words. But that sentence confused me for a while.

[Thomas]

http://jpdery.com/images/MixedUpSpelling.jpg

[bryce12]

I think using captchas and random questions should do the trick for you. I faced this problem earlier but ever since I introduced a random question on my Contact page, I am getting a lot less spam mails. You can also try other methods as outlined by _Darknite but make sure that you do not make the submission process too difficult for the users.

[tetutato]

I use a small plugin that has a slider feature (acts like a lock on iPhone) + captcha.

[Ram8349]

I think using captchas and random questions should do the trick for you. I faced this problem earlier but ever since I introduced a random question on my Contact page, I am getting a lot less spam mails. You can also try other methods as outlined by _Darknite but make sure that you do not make the submission process too difficult for the users.

 

I had captacha installed in place. The same one I used for the registration process which has been working quite well so far (for registeration). But I am still getting tons of spam mails through Contact. How come? Most of them aren't even in English.

[bryce12]

I had captacha installed in place. The same one I used for the registration process which has been working quite well so far (for registeration). But I am still getting tons of spam mails through Contact. How come? Most of them aren't even in English.

 

I think the spammers are using a service like Decaptcher or DeathbyCaptcha. These services provide automatic captcha solving and can be integrated with lots of automated link building and spamming tools. Try putting a random question or an animated captcha and see how it goes.

[simplysidy]

I would prefer to add some captcha or even ask some random question as cited above by Thomas

[DarkGizmo]

I like the  Q&A bit or perhaps a animated captcha that can't easily be solved by a program/bot;.

[SarahG]

Ah I was wondering this myself! Thanks for the ideas I think we need to put a recaptcha in place. Not 100% sure how to do that though... off to do some Googling.

[kingpost]

Yeh,  Normaly like Q&A

[enim]

I just saw, for the first time, a site using this method the other day: 

 

<script language=javascript>

<!--

 

var contact = "Contact us"

 

var email = "yourname"

 

var emailHost = "yourdomain.com"

 

document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + email + "@" + emailHost+ ">" + contact + "</a>" + ".")

 

//-->

</script>

 

I dont remember if that was their exact code, but it was close. That, though, only covers an email address.

 

I think the most user-friendly way to do it is to use some clever JS to hid the div until a certain number of seconds.  Like this: http://jsfiddle.net/W9YU5/

[Grumpy]

I do find personally that honeypots work best for preventing spam from an automated form-filling contact page. As a previous poster stated, bots generally aren't programmed to work through honeypots and they generally do tend to fill in the first sets of fields they find so honeypots can definitely work really well to stop spam from bots & automated programs. Stopping spam from humans, however, is a completely different thing... if a human really wants to spam you, they will do it and they will bypass any restrictions you place. The only thing to do is add IP blocks and continue to add the IPs of any spam mails you get to that filter. Eventually, after a long time, they will run out of proxies and IPs to use to spam you.

[crazycroc]

I find using random questions to be the most effective because it is very hard to write software that circumvents this. There are a variety of fancy ones that randomly generate different patterns or words for your users to type out but these are the ones that are most targeted by spam software.