Webmaster General Forum

Anyway, after a bit of research I've managed to stop it by luring it into a trap with a bit of bait. The spam has finally stopped. Here's how I did it:

- Add a new field to the form using a typical name - something like:
<input name="email2" type="text" size="45" id="email2" />

- Then wrap it in a hidden layer so that people using web browsers can't see it, eg:
<div style="visibility:hidden">
<input name="email2" type="text" size="45" id="email2" />
</div>

- Then add some logic to your form handling so that the contact form is not actually submitted if there's any data in the invisible field, eg:
$email2 = stripslashes($_POST["email2"]);
if (!empty($email2)) {
header("location: pretend_that_email_sent.php");
exit();
}

Because the robots don't use browsers, they don't realise the field is hidden and they fall into the trap of adding data to the field. Once they do that, you know it's spam and can stop the data being submitted.