Preventing spam, just a thought

We opened up a discussion over email today that made me think

Would you say that most forum/post or email form spam is automated ?
meaning the poster has a script/program that knows the post fields and automatically fills them and then posts.

If yes, I was thinking of a solution/script that would have the field names created at random on run time ?

Any thoughts ?

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Yeah there are many scripts out there doing that task. They can detect forms and post spam, or auto register to forums.

The solution you give looks good and it works for sure with forums, but I am not sure if it will work with contact forms.

The only way to know this is by doing it

yeah the "manual" spam is only a small part from the problem.

I hope a contact form like provided in my Tutorial will help:
http://www.finalwebsites.com/tutorials/php_ajax_contact_form.php

just installed one on a site where a lot of spam is send in the past

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There are two things that worked for me to prevent spam... captcha is one, but adding another text-input field and using visibility:hidden; or display:none; property to it, then adding on confirmation that if the text field is filled the script fails... the robots usually fills it up and always fail... the human always succeed since they can't fill or see it...

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There are two things that worked for me to prevent spam... captcha is one, but adding another text-input field and using visibility:hidden; or display:none; property to it, then adding on confirmation that if the text field is filled the script fails... the robots usually fills it up and always fail... the human always succeed since they can't fill or see it...

That's very clever. I will try it too

If you name this field "email" or "url" it will for sure trick those bots

yeah this is really a good one! (don't tell)

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yes best to name it either email or url, and assign the property on an external css class... hope you guys put it to good use...

There are two things that worked for me to prevent spam... captcha is one, but adding another text-input field and using visibility:hidden; or display:none; property to it, then adding on confirmation that if the text field is filled the script fails... the robots usually fills it up and always fail... the human always succeed since they can't fill or see it...

Chris! *grabs pen and paper*

GENIOUS. going in phphaze 1.61.

[**performing a Happy Dance**] I'll definitely keep this trick in mind when creating the next form on my web sites. Good one!!

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