Contact forms abuse

How do I stop spammers from hacking my forms?

[maialee]

I have some simple php forms on my site for customers to contact us. Someone comes in every night to our quote request form and fills it out with a bunch of links to Canadian drugs. They leave a fake email address and fake contact info. First, how does this benefit them? I don't understand that at all. Second, how can I stop this without making the forms a pain for our customers to use?

I did a whois and they have a fake email listed there too, but I contacted the registrar and asked them to do something about it.

[edited by: dreamcatcher at 1:23 pm (utc) on Feb. 26, 2007]
[edit reason] no urls, thanks. [/edit]

[dreamcatcher]

Hi maialee,

I`m afraid we don`t allow links to personal sites. What you have described is the behaviour of a spam bot, which is auto filling and submitting your forms.

Ideally you want some kind of spam prevention in place. A captcha code is the most common. Check out the following thread to get you started:

[webmasterworld.com...]

dc

[maialee]

Thank you! I'm going to make some changes as suggested in that thread.

I'm just curious, though. Do they think this is a forum or something? The spam they submit doesn't get to anyone but us, does it? It looks like they manually fill it out because the other day, this person simply wrote "test" in the text box.

[jatar_k]

bots just find forms and spam them, no big deal to them if a bunch don't pay off, it is a low return business, they blanket as much as they to get the return