In recent months I’ve seen a huge increase in spam from both my comment submission forms and the contact forms. ExpressionEngine’s blacklist features helped, and the Askimet service through which I route new comments prevented the spam comments from actually making it onto the site, but it still meant a lot of work for me, weeding things out of the database. This is time that I would prefer to spend designing. A lot of advice suggested implementing Captchas, but I’ve never liked them; the image-based technique is not readily accessible to the visually impaired and although audio Captchas are available they are still a bit clunky.
So I have implemented a Human Question. If you wish to submit a comment then you’ll be asked to answer a simple question that is (hopefully!) easy for humans but will, I hope, fox the spambots. Being text rather than image-based, it should be widely accessible to those using assistive technology. Yes, it is an extra step in submission forms that I have tried to keep as simple and hurdle-free as possible, but sadly it has become necessary. The good news is that implementing it was made very easy thanks to the Accessible Captcha extension for EE produced by Purple Dogfish. Well done guys.
Eastside Educational Trust
3am Solutions
UNIC UK
4 Comments… so far
And… so far so good. Two days in and I’ve yet to receive a single spam submission to either of the contact forms (previously it was running at about 12 a day). A check of the Askimet list shows only one comment waiting for moderation, and even that turned out to be a false positive that I subsequently okay-ed. So I think I can call this a success (for now).
I just added a couple more anti-spam questions into the randomiser for variety’s sake.
Ugh. Spammers are back. Not in as great a force but clearly not dealt with. Does this mean that these spam messages are being written by a human? Or are the bots just smart enough to pick out the answer to the anti-spam question?
And, more to the point, do they really think I’m going to click on a link to buy viagra or cheap cigarettes just because they sent it via my form?
Does anyone actually click on these links?
Bah!
Humm… interesting,
I certainly think that they question resolution is better than the image but i dont think that either will stop spam… companies are constantly coming up with new spam prepositions as fast as the previous spam has been resolved,
But sooner or later i guess either we will live with it or it will dissapear… i would prefer the second…
Thanks for writing,
Despite my comment back in October, the amount of spam I’ve been getting since introducing the Accessible Captcha is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the earlier situation.
The general consensus seems to be that a lot of form spam gets written by humans so as to get around such anti-spam measures, but I can live with the few I get (maybe 3-5 a month); it used to be 20+ a day!