Lack of interest Limit Contact Us Form to User Groups Awaiting Confirmation and higher

[NealC]

The Contact Us form seems to be a well known "exploit" to send spam and I'm not sure how to limit it. What I would suggest is that if someone has not registered on the forum they cannot use contact us. I was checking User Group permissions to see if this was something that could be disabled for unregistered but with the unregistered / unconfirmed sharing the same user group permissions this would not be possible.

We need a way to prevent anonymous users from using the Contact Us form but allow it for someone that may have registered but has not been able to verify their account.

 

[djbaxter]

I know you are posting a suggestion for core Xenforo but at least in the meantime there's this:

This addon eliminates virtually all Contact Form spam on forums where I've tested it. Anything left over is human spam but interestingly enough where I've been testing or using it there hasn't been any human spam - it's all been bots.

[OzzModz] Contact Us Spaminator [Paid]

ozzy47 submitted a new resource: [OzzModz] Contact Us Spaminator - Contact Us Form Spam Bot Fighting Tool Sick and tired of your inbox getting flooded with spam coming from the "Contact Us" system on your xenforo install(s)? You've tried everything and still it persists? You even shut off the...

xenforo.com

 

[NealC]

Thanks for the reply but I don't get enough to warrant a $30 add-on. This is a problem with the core that needs to be addressed and hopefully XF will do so as this is a common avenue of "attack" it seems.

 

[djbaxter]

Understood. However, I would note that one problem with bot attacks is that they can bypass normal antispam measures including reCaptcha. Currently, XF doesn't support reCaptcha 3 as far as I know, and I don't know if that would be any better. It would help if you could enable Captcha or Question-and-Answer for the Contact Form but as far as I know that isn't an option. That might well at least significantly reduce Contact Form spam for many forums.

 

[NealC]

If we could just avoid the use of the form for anonymous users that sure would help. Awaiting confirmation is non anonymous.

 

[Ozzy47]

The Contact Us form seems to be a well known "exploit" to send spam and I'm not sure how to limit it. What I would suggest is that if someone has not registered on the forum they cannot use contact us. I was checking User Group permissions to see if this was something that could be disabled for unregistered but with the unregistered / unconfirmed sharing the same user group permissions this would not be possible.

We need a way to prevent anonymous users from using the Contact Us form but allow it for someone that may have registered but has not been able to verify their account.

This will do what you need,

[OzzModz] No Contact Us For Guests

This simple addon removes the ability for guests to use the contact us form. If a guest tries to access the contact us form, they will get the standard XenForo permission error that they must be logged in. XenForo groups the guests and...

xenforo.com

 

[IFireflyl]

I had a couple of users use the Contact Us form to let me know that they were having registration problems that ended up being a server issue, so the only way I think I'd want the Contact Us form to be restricted for unregistered users is if there was a toggle to make that optional.