Suggestions to prevent spam?

  • Following up on my former thread (located here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/akismet-spam-messages?replies=7#post-4890403), I would like to add what I have done to prevent SPAM mails that are being sent through our conference sign-up form on our website.

    1) I have enabled the CAPTCHA (I always have this on).
    2) I have temporarily enabled the honeypot spambot trap.
    3) I have changed the URL to our sign-up form (also modified the slug of the webpage).
    4) I am actively using Akismet to filter spam messages.

    Unfortunately, I am still getting several spam mails each day. None of the above seems to have made any kind of impact, whatsoever.

    And being completely honest, and without being a technical wizard, I do not believe that the Fast Secure Contact Form plugin is to blame in any way. I believe I have run into a stream of bad luck, really.

    Question is, then. What can I do about this?

    Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions?

    Thank you for your time!

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/si-contact-form/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter bassa

    (@bassa)

    Here’s an example of a typical spam message:

    To:
    LEAD Conference 2014

    First Name: Lizzie
    Last Name: Westfall

    Email:
    [email protected]

    Message:

    Mobile phone:
    VP

    Company/organization:
    PY

    Position/job title:
    KO

    Country/location:
    Equatorial Guinea

    Industry:
    –

    How many attendees would you like to register?
    University Attendance

    Subscribe to the LEADing Practice newsletter.
    selected

    Akismet Spam Check: passed
    Sent from (ip address): 5.135.47.95 (5.135.47.95)
    Date/Time: 06/12/2013 06:00
    Coming from (referer): https://www.leadingpractice.com/events/register/
    Using (user agent): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112 Safari/535.1

    Thread Starter bassa

    (@bassa)

    As you can see in the above spam message, most of the information looks great (those spambots are really good nowadays, wow), however, there are these 3 values that I might be able to change:

    Mobile phone:
    VP

    Company/organization:
    PY

    Position/job title:
    KO

    Is there a way somehow to force the use of more letters/numbers in these fields? Those 2-letter entries happens on ALL the spam messages we’re getting.

    You can use the field settings for Regex

    Validation regex:
    Use a regular expression to validate if form input is in a specific format. Example: If you want numbers in a text field type but do not allow text, use this regex: /^\d+$/ Can be used for text, textarea, date and password field types.

    This will match 6 or more of any chars but newline
    /^.{6,}$/

    Regex fail message:
    Use to customize a message to alert the user when the form fails to validate a regex after post. Example: Please only enter numbers. For use with validation regex only.

    https://www.fastsecurecontactform.com/how-to-add-extra-fields

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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