[vox-tech] Strange web form submissions; regexp to filter?

[Larry Ozeran]

On 12/18/2008 at 1:42 AM Rick Moen sent:

>Quoting Bill Kendrick (nbs at sonic.net):
>
>> It looks like my Tux Paint survey's backend script is only sending me
>> fields I know about, and that make sense for that form.  So I'm not even
>> seeing the junk that the spammers' bots think is being posted on some
>> online forum.  It just vanishes, and I'm left with the nonsense.
>> (Verus the "<a href="...">online dating!</a>", or whatever.)
>
>Aha!
>
>I've just come across, on an online discussion of this sort of spam,
>what sounds like a truly brilliant idea for authors of Web forms:
>
>   The best solution we found to spam contacts is to have an invisible
>   field called 'email'. If it's filled, then it's spam, and ignored. We
>   haven't received a single spam contact on any of our sites since
>   implementing this.

Like Bill, I don't like CAPTCHAs. I like the simplicity of Rick's solution, but I already have a simple one working so I probably won't change it. I am listing it here in case the spammers figure out to ignore invisible fields or for any reason this works better on your site. When, like Bill, I started getting a huge number of spam in my form submissions, I added:
To reduce the many SPAM entries we receive, we regret that we must ask you to please enter the sum of 2, 3 (e.g. sum of 1, 2 is 3)

In 3 months, I haven't received another spam. If the spammers do ever figure it out, I suspect a minor change in the numbers or phrasing will fix it.

- Larry