dummy forms
Near the end of March, I disabled comments to the site (I renamed the script, thus breaking the link). I have been getting a new kind of comment spam that doesn’t get caught by MT Blacklist; those clever boys are randomly encoding the characters in their urls, so instead of “online-casinos” the url is “online-casinos”. The blacklist plugin doesn’t convert those entities back into characters, so they get past the filter.
This is, perhaps, fixed in the newer versions of MovableType, I don’t know, and I’m not upgrading just to find out. The spammers who use this method are a more sophisticated variety, they are using multiple IP numbers (either open proxies or zombied machines) so there’s no point in IP banning.
I’ve implemented dummy forms, as suggested by SimonG. These are duplicate comment entry forms that don’t display in the brower and that point to an incorrect comment URL. The idea is that automated scripts which look at the page source for the form tags will grab field names and urls from the dummy form, thus preventing the spam from getting posted.
I have also disabled new comments on older articles.
This is working incredibly well. I’m not even getting hits to MT Blacklist (which clutter up the MT logs).
hi,
I have a bit of a weird request… I need a code which would check inputted fields against each other ie: a SPAM Robot inputs the same field into each field available, I want to put in a string that checks the fields inputted against each other and if 03 or more field inputted data match, the form is not submitted – is this possible?… it must be… as with computers ANYTHING is possible – one just has to find the solution… however poor me is just on the first rung of the HTML/FormMail/PHP learning ladder and needs some help, please – have been surfing, but haven’t been able to find anything like what I need – perhaps I am looking in the wrong haystacks??
any and all assistance appreciated
thank you
@+ Jacqui
Hi sorry, forgot to say that it is for an online form
thanks