Contact Form Spam

[Deleted member 2163]

I've been getting a lot of contact form spam. I constantly get "requests" from "different" companies offering to do any combination of web development, seo, etc. I put "different" in quotes, because they're all phrased pretty similarly with the names and company names swapped out.

Here's my question: Is there a good way to prevent this from happening? Is there a way we can put re-captcha or some other human verification on the contact form if it's not already? Or if someone could point me in the direction of what template to edit so I can put a message discouraging these folks, should they prove to be humans, that would be awesome.

 

[Floris]

You have captcha for guests turned on?

 

[Floris]

What I do on XenFans.com is having the ragtek mod 'contact us form to thread' installed, and it includes the IP.
Our community manager reviews these entries and processes the results. They can be merged easily, the IP range can be recognized and blocked in ranges if it's repetitive, etc.

It takes a few weeks to catch them all, but spam has basically stopped (from the contact-us form).

 

[Dean]

...Is there a way we can put re-captcha or some other human verification on the contact form if it's not already?..

AdminCP -> Options -> Options -> Spam Management -> Enable CAPTCHA for Guests

Choose the one you want, ReCAPTCHA, or Q & A. That is for both registration and Contact Us.

 

[Deleted member 2163]

It was enabled for guests. I'll look into getting that ragtek mod though. Sounds like what I want. I just don't like getting all these emails.

 

[Dean]

Let me guess, did you have re-CAPTCHA enabled?

That does not seem to slow them down too much, I use Q & A.

 

[Deleted member 2163]

Yeah, I had re-CAPTCHA enabled. I'm fairly disappointed that they're able to bypass it now. I'll try Q & A. Any suggestions for the questions to ask?

 

[Floris]

I don't know why software still comes with captcha and re-captcha, since they're both broken, very hard to real for real humans, and q/a is doing so much better with the right questions.

 

[Deleted member 2163]

But, but, but... it helps digitize books!!111

No, yeah, you're right. I usually click the refresh button a few times to get an easier set of reCAPTCHA words. That alone probably defeats the purpose.

 

[Dean]

... Any suggestions for the questions to ask?

I took a peek at your site, maybe something about gaming?

Or maybe something as simple as 'two plus two equals?" (type out the numbers not the numbers themselves). It really does not take a lot to keep them out.

 

[Deleted member 2163]

I'll add a few easy questions. Hopefully that'll help. For the record I haven't had many actual spammers register, so either they're just not registering on my site or reCAPTCHA is kind-of working. Either way I won't be sad to get rid of it.