Spammers targetting my enquiry Form

Jon12345

I have a simple enquiry form here:

When you click submit, you are taken to a page with some php that just emails me the enqury.

At the moment, it is being targetted by spammers so I am getting hundreds of rubbish enquiries per day. How can I stop this? Is there a way to make such a form less attractive to spammers?

Thanks,

Jon

HeyRay2

You could implement some code to limit how often an enquiry can be submitted by a user, perhaps by tracking their IP address in a database or placing a cookie.

etully

When the form is built, pick a random number, embed it in the form, and write it to the database. When the user submits the form, check the database to see if that random number exists there. If so, then delete the number from the database and send the email. If not, then terminate without sending the mail. This will prevent spammers from bypassing the Form and just posting directly to your PHP script.

konrad

You can implement a capcha solution or check submitted content. Most of spam contains links to spammers sites. You can limit the number of URLs sent by the form (5 works good for me).

halojoy

... or check submitted content.

Where you validate input,
( checking if posted variable is empty and so )
you can add a filter, an array of words that may not be submitted
you can even count for how many times strings like:
http://
www.
sexy
fucck
is found in the text posted

Most forum and many contact, comment scripts HAVE TO use such filtering.
Because we all know, that these days
there are spammers that both automatically and manually
submit spam links in even the smallest little personal blog.

Jon12345

What percentage of people have cookies enabled? Just wondering how likely it would be that I would lose a customer. Also, do you think a spammer would have cookies disabled? Otherwise their PC would fill up with them wouldn' they?

cahva

Check out this thread. Those 2 functions alone in there are a good way to stop spammers trying to use your service as a spam-machine.