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Full Version: Stopping Form Bots?
HTMLHelp Forums > Programming > Client-side Scripting
juleepie
Hi all, first time poster. I have a pretty nice Form2Email form going on my website and for the past 2 months had no problems. The form has a text box for visitors to post links to reference images (its an art site that requires reference material)--the bots are now using this text box to post URL's to porn sites and scams, etc and my business e-mail is getting flooded.
I've looked everywhere for the past two days on a SIMPLE solution, hopefully in plain html, i.e. a question that could only be answered by a human being. For example, "is fire hot or cold?" if the user types "hot", the form goes through. If the question is not answered properly, the form will not be sent to the email. OR, even something as simple as "What is 1+1?" or "are you a bot?" with a drop-down menu or something...
Anyway, I am still unsure as to whether this sort of thing requires PHP or Javascript. I'm pretty amateur and am hoping for a simple html solution. I tried installing a Captcha! php script on the site but in order to do so, needed to put some tags on my page above the <html> tags and Frontpage (yes, I told you I'm amateur) kept moving my tags into the body of the html instead.
I also installed an invisible form on the form page, before the actual form, hoping that it would fool bots. Unfortunately these are scamming "gmail" accounts so the invisible form is not stopping them.

Thank you in advance for any solutions or suggestions to stop these spamming bots! smile.gif
Darin McGrew
HTML can't do it. HTML can't do anything. It isn't a programming language; it's just markup (paragraphs, headings, lists, etc.).

For a relatively small site, it doesn't matter much what the question is, as long as it's unique to your site. The question for registering for this forum is pretty trivial, but has been fairly effective. So pick a question, make sure the default answer is wrong, and configure your server-side (e.g., CGI, PHP) program to reject any form submission without the right answer. See the FAQ entry How can I require that fields be filled in, or filled in correctly?
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