SPAM, SPAM, SPAM. How do I hate thee.
Well, it finally happened again – abuse of one of our web pages by spammers. This time, it is form spam – an automated web crawling tool (I assume) has discovered the “save/send/share” feature of print-bingo.com. That form lets print-bingo.com users email their custom bingo designs to friends, family, or themselves. This form is now used by a spam bot network to send poor quality spam using our “invite” emails. I’m currently getting about 10 bounce backs a day and growing – it has to be stopped before my VPS gets blacklisted for spamming.
I could setup a CAPTCHA, but I hate them – particularly the ticketmaster.com’s. So, I will try to foil spammers with simple tricks to fool “dumb” automated spam software.
I’m trying a hidden to humans “fake” email field. This post Quick tip to fight email form spam is the model. The basic idea is to create a form field with “email” in the name and hide it with CSS (display:none) so that humans will not see or fill in the field. Then deny attempts to use the form where the hidden field has been filled in.
We’ll see how well this works.
Merry Christmas!