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 Screenshot - 2022-10-24T152059.908.png](https://xenforo.com/community/data/attachments/274/274710-7885b58e7d5e6b1072a8f5b9437e2cae.jpg?hash=eIW1jn1eax)
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.
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 Screenshot - 2022-10-24T152059.908.png](https://xenforo.com/community/data/attachments/274/274710-7885b58e7d5e6b1072a8f5b9437e2cae.jpg?hash=eIW1jn1eax)
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.