XF 2.2 Randomize Contact Form URL: MyForum.com/misc/contact

MapleOne

Well-known member
With contact form spam becoming more and more problematic I am finding the security controls to be quite ineffective and other than a PAID Ozz Mod modification there seems to be no end to it.

I have been trying to figure out how the spammers do it and finally realized they just use:

MyForum.com/misc/contact

And from there on their bot solves captcha using a special program.

The easiest solution (in my humble opinion) would be to randomize the address:

MyForum.com/misc/contact/random1586^$1

Would that not solve the issue?

In other words every time the contact link gets clicked the popup has a unique identifier and the bots cannot simply visit our generic contact form address.

Just thinking out loud here.

I simply added my own link to mailto:me@myforum.com and spam stopped completely.

Screenshot - 2022-10-24T152059.908.png


So as soon as I disabled the generic address my spam was gone and has not returned, this got me thinking about the random address thing.

I prefer the pop up form because it gives me the info I need but I will take a straight email at the moment to lessen the spam.
 
cool idea. probably should be in the suggestions thread to get voted on.


Another thing that helped me was to disable to form for guests. That defeats the purpose a bit some times (eg, help, i'm locked out! requests) so i put an obfuscated link to a direct email in the no permissions message.
 
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