{"id":5880,"date":"2013-07-26T08:00:19","date_gmt":"2013-07-26T08:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adviceinteractivegroup.com\/?p=5880"},"modified":"2013-07-26T08:00:19","modified_gmt":"2013-07-26T08:00:19","slug":"web-form-spam-protection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advicelocal.com\/blog\/web-form-spam-protection\/","title":{"rendered":"Web Form Spam Protection"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Fight Against Web Form Spam<\/h2>\n

In the early days of Advice, one of the most common trouble tickets we would receive went something like this: \u201cHi Support, I\u2019m receiving hundreds of spam emails a day from our web forms \u2013 isn\u2019t there anything we can do to stop this?\u201d<\/p>\n

For a developer, there are some seemingly easy answers to this, but I\u2019ve found it\u2019s more complicated than it seems. Today, I want to take some time to address my personal experience with web form spam protection<\/strong>, and share what I have found to be the most effective deterrent.<\/p>\n

But first \u2013 what hasn\u2019t worked:<\/p>\n

Captchas<\/h2>\n

\"Captcha-<\/a>This is a common \u2018go to\u2019 for web form spam protection. From making users decipher garbled text to making them solve math problems, it\u2019s not exactly the most user friendly of solutions. In fact, users (and clients) typically hate it. It makes sense on say, a password recovery form, but when you\u2019re trying to remove as many obstacles as possible to get a form submission, it\u2019s just not ideal.<\/p>\n

To compound this, designs that I have been given to build have not always allowed for sufficient space for a captcha to appear. And all of this ignores entirely the fact that spammers have created things like \u2018captcha farms\u2019 to help solve these \u2018human tests\u2019 in bulk.<\/p>\n

Our mileage varied with captchas. It would sometimes dramatically reduce spam in the short term but it did not seem to be a total solution.<\/p>\n

Which leads us to our next \u2018fix\u2019\u2026.<\/p>\n

Honeypots<\/h2>\n

The theory behind honeypots is that bots ignore javascript (and sometimes even CSS) and therefore can be tricked into filling out form fields that are invisible to human visitors.<\/p>\n

The implementation is simple: add a plausible field to your form (labeled something like \u2018Country\u2019 or some other common field you don\u2019t intend to collect) and then hide it with CSS or javascript. If the field is filled out, you know that a bot that was ignoring these technologies filled out the form, and you can exit your form submission without firing off an email to the client.<\/p>\n

Once again, honeypots sometimes exhibited some improvement for web form spam protection, but I think spam bots (and the people who write them) are getting savvy to this, and even this didn\u2019t stop spam at the level we would have liked.<\/p>\n

The Real Solution: IP Logging<\/h2>\n

A couple years ago, we moved to Wufoo<\/a> for our forms. Wufoo offers powerful WYSIWYG tools to help non-technical staff build forms, but it also dramatically reduces the time we spend on validation routines and multi-page form building.<\/p>\n

But beyond all this, Wufoo has proven to be very spam resistant, provided that we enable an option on our forms that only allows one submission per IP. If we don\u2019t check this, the spam flows in as usual.<\/p>\n

This of course doesn\u2019t stop spam entirely, but it does stop it dramatically. Since moving to Wufoo, I almost never receive complaints about form spam. And as much as I love Wufoo, I know from experience that it is the IP logging that makes it so robust.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t want to pay for forms, you can always build a simple solution using a database table and the web programming language of your choice. It is, in my experience, preferable to honey potting and captchas (and even those two solutions combined!).<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n

Like I said \u2013 at the end of the day, it\u2019s dang near impossible to guarantee that your clients won\u2019t get some offers for cheap Louis Vuitton or Cialis, but you can make sure it doesn\u2019t take over their email.<\/p>\n

Have a method for web form spam protection that you’ve found? Join the conversation below!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Fight Against Web Form Spam In the early days of Advice, one of the most common trouble tickets we 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