I recently found a Sitepoint post regarding hidden fields in forms. e.g.
And similar. Javascript code was added for information.
In the body of the article was this quote
“Now you can rest assured that if the field ever has a value when the form submission reaches your server then the transaction can be discarded as junk.”
Unfortunately it was not explained how that part was achieved. Does anyone have any experience of trying this method. I know there is no infallible method (not legal anyway)
We have noticed an upsurge of the old type of spam, mainly assisting sexual performance, and many in Cyrillic text that English speakers ‘might’ have difficulty with reading, why do they bother?
The sites are Wordpress with Contact form 7 contact forms. As mentioned the article writer supplied example code, but no help ( for the likes of me) in how to test implemented code and resultant completed/spam form and ignore/remove.
Would love to hear from others who have managed this. I realise there is no universal panacea but happy to try a selection of things.
not sure how to do it on wordpress but one of the simplest things i’ve ever done to stop spam was just put a picture of a horse and ask people to write the type of animal in a form field. You can add a simple audio file for accessibility and simple say ‘Please write horse in the field’ etc. Then just check the field matches the animal.
The bots have so far not broken it. They just aren’t able to work out what a picture of a horse looks like as that takes a lot of AI work, even google struggles. Especially if it is just the head etc as the human brain can easily work it out but computers find it very hard.
If the bots break it just change the picture and audio to something else, literally anything.
Thanks for the reply, I will try Honeypot first. I did wonder about adding a quiz, but mobile users lack patience as it is. Hence my reluctance to use the Google click on the Shop/Car/Signs.