[RESOLVED] Review application for a client's site won't stop sending spam!

Paul_help_

Hi guys.

I am having a serious problem with a review application I have built for a customer.

The application is up online and he is getting continuous spam, and it is never ending.

Basically, I have made it so the website visitor can simply visit his website and leave a review. There is no login required or anything. As this would be too much messing around for someone to simply leave a review post.

If you read some of this stuff, there is a ridiculous amount of junk, including what appears to be email conversations between people and news articles.

There is an immense amount of junk,, and it seems to be increasing by the minute.

It is up to 180+ posts!

Is there anything I could include within the form itself you prevent spam from automatically sending.

I often see these check boxes at the end of forms that people need to click to prove they are human and not spam.
Could you give me some ideas on how I could include something like this? Is it easy to implement?? And what are they called?

Thanks guys.

Paul.

NogDog

Welcome to the Internet. 🙁

Among your options are adding a "captcha" implementation (e.g. https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/ ), human moderation to approve reviews before they are displayable, and using some sort of AI to analyze responses for appropriateness (the last probably being outside the financial bounds of most sites, I suspect 😉 ). I'd probably start with the recaptcha in terms of stopping bots, and see if that makes any significant reduction.

Paul_help_

thanks. Is the "captcha" implementation with google free?

and is it easy to add to my codes?

cluelessPHP

I think dale mentioned this idea awhile ago in another thread but might be worth looking at

http://devgrow.com/simple-php-honey-pot/

dalecosp

The other thing is try to figure out, at least on the surface, their motivation. If there's any possibility that they're co-opting your form to send mail to anyone besides your client, take it down immediately (I guess I mention that because you mention "conversations between people"). Of course, a lot of "conversations between people" in comment spam are mostly about leaving links for "Google Juice". Do you have link functionality in the comments? What happens if you remove it?

And if you feel yourself to be in danger of losing your client, I'd also consider taking it down. You don't want customers angry (or extremely frustrated) at you.

After that you can mitigate the issue.

There are several things you might do to help mitigate this, but requiring a credential might be among the best. Do you suppose a large number of your users use a 3rd-party social site? Sometimes you can use something like the FaceBook SDK to have them login to your site ... not very objectionable for anyone who's a member. I've implemented it a couple times ... doesn't seem like it was terribly time-consuming...