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Automatic Form Submissions

How do you prevent this from happening?

         

pageoneresults

2:52 am on Dec 19, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Okay, here's the deal. We have a submission form for consultants and/or companies to submit their website for review.

Over the past 30-45 days, we seem to have been included in an auto submission type software and are getting at least 1-2 irrelevant submissions a day. It's not a big deal to just delete them, but we want to prevent this from escalating.

I've looked at one option that is an image generation program that prevents automatic form submissions by robots. I'm wondering if there is something less tech oriented that we can do to stop these submissions.

I can always play cat and mouse and make certain fields required to prevent the submissions, but I have better things to do with my time. Any suggestions? We are on a Windows 2000 Server with IIS 5 and I do have access to an asp programmer. Is there anything I can do with html or a download script that will work without server configuration?

rcjordan

3:08 am on Dec 19, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The perl scripts I've used or had developed include a referrer check, where you set the domains that will host the form, other off-site referrers (like submittal scripts) are then excluded.

WebGuerrilla

3:14 am on Dec 19, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member




Create a hidden field that grabs the referring url pased by the browser. If a script tries to connect directly to your form, they won't pass the proper referral, so it won't work.

pageoneresults

3:29 am on Dec 19, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Thanks admins!

rcjordan, unfortunately I'm not the tech head just yet, but I'm learning.

WG, your solution sounds like the simplest one for someone like me until I can get my programmer involved. What would that hidden field look like? For example, this is one that I use to log IP addresses...

<input type="hidden" name="remote" value="<%=request.servervariables("remote_addr")%>">