Site Spammers on Forms

[primemover]

Help, I have a number of sites, principally www.blackfriarsgroup.com that collect information by form. In the last few months we have been going through phases of receiving hundreds of fake spam forms from various pages. Is there a way to stop this?

[DaveSawers]

I've had the same problem with comments to my blog so I had to change the setup to pre-moderate entries rather than allowing them to be displayed as soon as they were written.

Unfortunately, there is no way to sort the trash from the legitimate users. It's just like spam e-mails, you'll have to learn to live with it.

[primemover]

Thanks Dave, I had a feeling that might be the answer, but you never know.

[davebarnes]

Add a captcha to each form.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

[nseidm1]

Chapchas work fine, but a simpler fix is just add a button titled "anti spam button". It works fine on my website, and haven't received a single spam since!!!!

[Matt Kelly]

Chapchas work fine, but a simpler fix is just add a button titled "anti spam button". It works fine on my website, and haven't received a single spam since!!!!

Neat idea! I like that much better than the Captcha's as I find those extremely annoying as a user when I fill out forms at other websites. What really annoys me is when I mistake a number/letter for another number/letter and have to try again... So I guess I am annoyed by my own stupidity.

I typically set it up so that the page that sends the email will only send emails when the page that the information comes from is from the same domain. Most of these form spammers simply have automatic scripts that strip the form submission page of the form target along with all inputs in the form and then make a script that simply mimics that form page and submits to the email sending page.

I do that myself to auto login to websites, I create a form on my website that uses java script to auto submit the required form information on a website login page. Then I just bookmark the auto submit page and can automatically login a website just by visiting that form.