Contact Us Spam

[nodle]

I have heard Cleantalk is supposed to be good at blocking spam on contact forums, I see they have an add-on here, might be worth a try. I personally have not used it though.

Unmaintained - AntiSpam by CleanTalk

No CAPTCHA, no questions, no counting animals, no puzzles, no math. No spambots signups, no spambots posts. Anti-spam features: Stop spambots at registrations. Stop spambots at the orders. Contact form protection (CAPTCHA should be disabled!)...

xenforo.com

 

[MapleOne]

View attachment 275637

PS,: I stopped the spam 100% my using a custom contact form URL and simply inserting the board email address.


Never had a spam email from them since because their spam bots are looking for a form.

If you enter it like this below it will even say contact form as the subject, just edit the address and subject line to your liking.

 

[nocte]

Never had a spam email from them since because their spam bots are looking for a form.

If your email address is not yet known by many spammers, then that's not a good idea IMHO: Nothing easier than crawling sites for email-addresses in the html source in order to fill the inboxes with spam emails. :-/

So, if you want to go that route (with just an email link), you should at least obscure your email address a bit.

Example (can be improved):

javascript:window.location=('mailto:' + 'user' + '@' + 'domainname' + '.tld?subject=Hello world');

-> change user, domainname and tld and paste it in the "Custom URL" field.

You could improve it with base64 encoding. Example:

javascript:window.location=('mailto:' + 'user' + '@' + atob('Z21haWwuY29t') + '?subject=Hello world');

-> Z21haWwuY29t is for gmail.com. Use https://www.base64encode.org/ to encode your own domain.

 

[MapleOne]

Thank you for that, I will use it if I see any issues.

I have a number of businesses and all the email addresses are clearly on the websites. Gmail sorts the spam incredibly well, I cannot remember seeing spam unless I look into my spam folder of course.

So spammers getting my address is not a huge concern right now but if I get a problem I will change the address and implement your suggestion for sure.

 

[nocte]

Well, if you are fine with crawlers seeing your email address that easily, then you don't need to take any actions. But if spam increases, it will take quite a while till obscuring your email address has any effect and spam decreases again.

I think it also makes a difference if the mail address is printed on some sub-page or on the domain root (and all sub-pages, which may be the case if one uses it for the XF "contact" link).

 

[PASS]

For me, no contact us form avail to guests. Referred to our FB instead.

 

[ENF]

For me, no contact us form avail to guests. Referred to our FB instead.

We redirected the Contact Us link to the login page; there's a notice there if people need to contact us for business or support matters.