How to Combat Web Form Spam
At some time or another we’ve all gotten unsolicited commercial emails in our email box – Commonly called Email Spam. But did you know if you put a contact form on your site to protect your email you could still get Web Form Spam?
Web Form Spam is when someone (or something) fills out your web form with random pieces of information and submits the form. If you’re using a simple web-form-to-email script like formmail you’ll likely see a bunch of form submissions with no data in them. That’s web form spam. But why would someone do this? Usually they think the form is posting their data somewhere on your web site and not being sent to your inbox. The spammers try to submit the form with links back to their own site to build up their search engine rankings.
So how do you protect your inbox from being flooded with Web Form Spam? Well it helps a little bit to know how they are doing this. Most of them simply scan your website for web forms. They have scripts (or web-bots) to do this. A human being almost never does it. When they find a form on your site, the web-bot fills in the fields and hits “submit”. Then you get an email with a partially filled in form usually with dozens (or hundreds) of links back to the spammer’s site.
A lot of people use captcha images to protect their email box from web form spam. Captcha images are those little pictures with random letters and numbers that you have to type into a text box to prove you’re a person. You’ve probably seen these and wondered what they were for. Well that’s what their for – To Stop formmail spam. This works great except you’ll loose good people who have a hard time figuring out exactly what letters and numbers the captcha image is trying to show them. Personally I’ve not submitted a few forms because I simply gave up trying to figure out the captcha image.
Here is a little known way to prevent 90% of your formmail spam without forcing your users to answers a confusing captcha image:
First Make sure your web form has most (if not all) of your fields set to be required. Required means the field must be complete for the form results to get your email box. Don’t use fancy javascript form validation because the web-bots don’t follow it anyway. Remember they are only submitting the form based on the raw HTML code. Not reading it in a browser.
Secondly use a drop-down selection box and also make it required. This forces the web-bots to select something from a list rather than just typing nonsense into a form field. This one technique can stop most of your web form spam in its tracks. You don’t need a bunch of drop down selections boxes on your web form- one will be enough.
If you’re not a programmer there are web form to email services like mine that will help protect your email from web form spam in exactly the manner I’ve told you.
Web Form Spam can be annoying when you have to need through dozens of spam submissions each day. But by trying the techniques I’ve outlined above you should have almost no web form spam in your email box.
Author: Scott Henson
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: US Dollar credit card