Posts Tagged ‘form’

Contact Us Through our New Contact Form on perceptus.ca

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

We did a largish update to our corporate homepage, perceptus.ca.

There are little changes here and there such as a new background graphic, some updates to the copy, and some changes to the layout.

The most important bit, which really was the catalyst for the change, was our  new contact form, complete with reCAPTCHA to keep the spam to a minimum.  The contact form is actually a test page for us, it’s designed to be highly portable, and you’ll see it on most of our critical websites very soon.

We might even publish the class file – it is far  better than the top few  contact form scripts in PHP that turn up on a search on Google.

User Friendly Form Spam Block

Thursday, December 25th, 2008

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!