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

[MapleOne]

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.




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.

 

[briansol]

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.