Preventing SpamBot Guestbook Abuse

Reduce self-SPAM and bogus guestbooks entries

[mnamesir]

I've recently gottem SPAM from my own website- I used a Form to prevent my name from being on the site in plain text; that form sends the mail to me and a copy to the 'sender'. Also around the same time, my guestbook was hit with automated entries... Those at least are for just link ratings in the search engines.

So an easy way to prevent much of it is to just put an image containing numbers and letters on the guestbook add page or email send page; failure to enter those letters in a certain text field results in a Stop of the script. So the image cannot be read by a Bot (JavaScript can be), thus the Bot cannot enter the right digits. Not entering the right digits makes the routine fail.

Of course there are ways to process an image and to figure out what letters are on there automatically, but there are other ways to prevent that from happening by using something like "Server Objects' ASP Image"... You can use server-side variables and scripting to make a random sequence of letters and numbers.

[trillianjedi]

Always a good idea to have some form of protection in place - thanks for the post about your experience and solution.

There are scripts for implementing random letter/number sequences in a graphic for most forums now also, to introduce validation and prevent bot spam posts.

TJ