[RESOLVED] Best way to prevent email form spamming

brendan2b

I have a site in which users upload pictures and then people can comment about other people's photos. I also have a contact section where users may contact individuals of the site.

The problem is when the form is submitted the data gets sent to that user's email address stored in the db. Right now I have a Captcha in the form to prevent bots and other garbage from using that script to send out their own emails.

Is this one of the most secure and most practical ways of using a contact form without wanting people using it to send their own email?

There are others things I do as well such as create an encryption key and store it in a session to make sure the user is submitting on my site and not from an external script.

How far should I got before telling myself that this is secure and to move on. The last thing I want is users telling me that they are getting spam because the form wasn't secure enough.

Thanks guys.

laserlight

brendan2b wrote:
Is this one of the most secure and most practical ways of using a contact form without wanting people using it to send their own email?

The security depends on the CAPTCHA, so it depends, methinks. There is also the issue of legitimate users failing the CAPTCHA. Generally, I think that it is the best defense we have now, along with spam detection techniques. A combination of techniques, e.g., Mollom might be worth considering.

Of course, you can also offer your users the option of not being contacted via email 🙂

brendan2b

Thanks for the reply, I have looked into Mollom but still cannot decide which is the best way for me to do it.

Maybe I should learn more about spamming bots so I can figure out better methods to stop them.

bradgrafelman

You might try some simple custom CAPTCHAs.

For example, if I were to ask you to please tell me what "two plus 4" is, wouldn't you respond with '6' or 'six'?

A spam bot, more than likely, would not.

brendan2b

Wow, how funny is that because that is currently my custom captcha. Hah.

A mixture between words/numbers with an answer to the equation as the captcha.

I like your ideas.