iambic9 - 11:24 am on Aug 17, 2009 (gmt 0)

...a hidden box that when filled the application is rejected without me seeing it. People don't fill in boxes they don't see, bots do.

Hello everyone, I have a number of forms on our site that are subjected to regular automated submissions. I have always dealt with this by heavily sanitizing / filtering input and then letting the bots get on with it.

The above solution is beautifully elegant in its simplicity and I'm going to implement this today, there are likely to be a number of scenarios where this might not be appropriate, but for us this will be a perfect solution.

I do not run a directory nor do I submit to them often, but have much experience with dealing with inappropriate user submissions. Before I owned my own company I used to work as a developer for other companies and have come across the problem of "bad" submissions quite often.

One technique I have found to be rather effective in dealing with this issue was to create a funneling / filtering process prior to the user being able to enter any data. I was hired by one company in particular that produced rather expensive, fantastically interesting widgets, that were – in reality – only appropriate for very specific people and uses, (even I would like one!) The problem was that they would receive hundreds of emails a week from people that didn't understand that this widget was in no way appropriate for them, mixed in with these emails were a minority percentage of emails that were potentially worth many tens of thousands of pounds in new business. The company was wasting dozens of man hours every week chasing up, rejecting, filtering, redirecting to appropriate departments and deleting these form submissions.

We created a form that dynamically built itself based on user input or eventually redirected the user to a page that helped the user understand why this widget was not appropriate for them. We tweaked it over a period of weeks based on feedback from the staff receiving these submissions and reduced the enquiries from hundreds down to 50< tight appropriate submissions. The questions were *very* specific requiring yes / no answers, the user could get to a dynamically built form in as few as 1 or 2 answers or as many as 10 answers or end up at an "Information page" offering a way of contact if they were still interested (They almost never get queries from those pages). We felt that it was important to explain or help the user to understand why this was not for them, perhaps this attitude should extend to directory submissions if it can be automated? It doesn't cost anything to be polite, but I can understand how you can become jaded if you are dealing with thousands of inappropriate / automated listing requests, or if you do not have to worry about public image in that respect.

There are a couple of points here:

-- The Q&A process could be lengthly, this in itself acted as a deterrent for users that were not really that interested, or users that took a while to realize that this widget was not for them, be careful not to put off genuine submissions.

-- For *real* users it needs to be an almost transparent process, fast simple and responsive, although generally we found these users ended up in the right place after just one or two questions though.

If you managed to filter out bots and inappropriate submissions, would it be viable for you to enter, or automate the entry of the data that the user is perhaps slipping up on?