Can somebody inform me what the best solution there is at the moment to protect my Forms against Spam?
Ronald
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Hi Ronald,
You have a couple of different options for FW as far as actions are concerned:
Depending on FW5 Pro or FW6 Pro you have the PHP Feedback Form or FW6 with the Send form action.
The above check for spam bot usage through a hidden field which a spam bot would fill and so can be detected, I believe the Send Form action also has this security.
I have the easiForm actions which allows you to add a CAPTCHA for the same purpose as such, you have the option of an Image CAPTCHA or a Math question that needs to be answered in able to send the form, personally I prefer the Math question of the two methods as it is easier to answer than most CAPTCHA images, but that might be a personal preference.
Although a hidden field can serve the same purpose many clients like the idea of having a visible form of stopping spam, even if a human can get around it they still like the fact their web contact form has this, while the hidden field basically serves the same purpose it is not a visible ‘thing’ on a form. Maybe most people just think a CAPTCHA ‘of a type’ is what is expected of a web contact form for it to be a professional looking form! maybe a fashion trend! who knows but most people seem to want one 
The problem with web type contact forms is that many are filled in by humans and so make fairly much render the use of a hidden field or a CAPTCHA useless although they still offer a lot of protection against spam bots ‘which is what they are generally directed at’ although I could not say if spam bots now check to see if the form fields etc. they are filling in are hidden or not! In all honesty I would think that whoever writes these apps would have caught on to the use of hidden fields… but maybe they have not.
The easiForm actions have the addition of a ‘Bad words’ filter, this is a field where you can add words that you do not want the sender to use and if used will not permit the contact form to be sent ‘Currently Bad words only applies to Required fields in easiForm, non required fields are not checked’. When I added this to easiForm it was added to stop certain swear words from being used in forms… but over time I realised it was a great spam stopper… how? A lot of spam that I myself was getting ‘and since discovered that many others where also’ where emails with something like:
[link=http://some_pills_site.com][url=http://some_pills_site.com]
[http=some_pills_site.com]
What I did was I added a menu with the ‘[link, [url,[http’ options in it so you do not need to actually add these to the bad words filter field, when I have found other types of spam coming through I just alter/add to my bad words filter to block it, so far it seems to be a great way of blocking spam from any of my web pages that use easiForm.
You need to be aware that if you added ‘pill,sex’ to the bad words filter that ‘required’ fields or textareas would not permit any text with the words ‘sex’ or ‘pill’ in it and that included ‘pillows’ or ‘sussex’ for example so you need to think a bit before entering words into the bad words filter. My strategy on this has been to select the ‘[link, [url,[http’ option form the Bad words many and then take things from there, in other words wait for spam and then add bad words from there.
Spam is an ongoing thing, no matter what you do those who send it will try to find a way around it. I myself use easiForm on several of my own sites have found the Bad words filter to be the best measure of stopping spam… but be warned: this is not a fill in once and forget spam stopper, as someone will always find something to spam you about so there is no easy 100% full proof method of stopping it totally, for example there was a stage where I was getting spam emails with gibberish in them, there are not any spam traps that I know that will catch this but on the positive side I put this down to children or immature adults trying to be a pain, this sort of spam does nothing except take up the time of the sender to send them and the receiver to delete them. That type of spam seems to die out after the sender ‘probably’ has a spark go off in their brain and realised they are the one who is wasting his time!
The PHP Feedback Form and Send Form actions are free while the easiForm actions are not although the latter I consider cheap for what they do and the time they can save along with the support the users get. The easiForm actions need your server to be ioncube friendly, now there are very few hosting companies that cannot accommodate ioncube and with many hosting companies it is already activated, in some already installed and running on the server. For example: ‘have host’ have it auto installed server wide as far as I know, ‘ineedwebhosting’ have it installed you just need to add the loader file on your hosting account which is how many hosting companies work from what I have found.
With easiForm you can set up your form and make sure all is well before making your purchase, in fact you can upload the loaders file and with a file that tells you if ioncube is already available on your server.
If you want free options then the Feedback Form and Send mail forms are probably reasonable options.
easiForm / easiCaptcha can be downloaded from:
http://www.actionsforge.com/actions/view/55-php-easiform
http://easibase.com
easiForm tutorial:
http://easibase.com/freeway/freeway_form.php
There are other options that FW users have worked with, FormsToGo is one of those.
Hopefully this offers some information for your question, sorry for the long email.
On May 6, 2013, at 1:55 PM, Ronald Botman wrote:
Can somebody inform me what the best solution there is at the moment to protect my Forms against Spam?
Ronald
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There is an action called anti spam. Use it since years. No spam.
http://www.actionsforge.com/actions/view/28-anti-spam
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Thanks for both suggestions and will look into both.
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GTPeter. One more question. If I use the anti-spam action, you can apply this to a complete website folder, page or item.
Don’t understand the exact difference. Why not always use it on the folder? Then it will apply to all item in my website. Right?
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The Anti-Spam Action looks for unencoded e-mail addresses – addresses that are in plain sight – and uses one or another method to encode them into gibberish that still works as an address, but isn’t as immediately recognizable as an e-mail address. The whole point of it is to reduce the chance that an automatic search bot, scanning the entire Web one page at a time, won’t spot those addresses and add them to its database. Like anything related to automated discovery, it’s a Spy vs. Spy game, escalating all the time. The very best way to avoid this sort of attack is to never use e-mail addresses in your Web pages.
But from your message subject, I think you may already be using a contact form. Contact forms, by design, do not expose an e-mail address to the world. This Action will not have any effect in that case. It will only protect e-mail addresses that are exposed in the clear in your Web pages.
Walter
On May 9, 2013, at 7:37 AM, Ronald Botman wrote:
GTPeter. One more question. If I use the anti-spam action, you can apply this to a complete website folder, page or item.
Don’t understand the exact difference. Why not always use it on the folder? Then it will apply to all item in my website. Right?
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Hi all,
I’m using now the Anti Spam action for my form, but still get a lot of emails like below:
Naam aanvrager: Diego
Email aanvrager: email@hidden
Bericht: It’s OK <a href=ttp://level5motorsports.com/schedule/ ">many mg clomid should take type of service. This communication should be documented in the patients
The form you can see here:
www.perpetuabloematelier.nl/perpetuabloematl.html
Is there any one who knows what I can do to block these messages?
Ronald
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There is no action/method that will eradicate the army of low paid workers in India etc. that sit at computers manually filling out forms all day for a few cents a form.
Mike B’s easiform action does have options where you can reject forms with 'Bad Words" in them and also hyperlinks - check it out at http://easibase.com/freeway/freeway_form.php
David
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Thanks David, is there no other solution?
The easibase actions I have to buy and only can block the bad words.
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Hi Ronald,
Make sure you are using the latest version of the Action and enable both the spam Trap and Log IP Address features. If the spam you get appears to be from the same IP address (or a limited range) you can block these simply by entering the addresses into the Action. Blocked spammers get to see the ‘thanks for your email’ page as normal but the resulting email is never actually sent by the server.
Regards,
Tim.
On 4 Jun 2013, at 11:34, Ronald Botman wrote:
Thanks David, is there no other solution?
The easibase actions I have to buy and only can block the bad words.
FreewayActions.com - Freeware and commercial Actions for Freeway Express & Pro - http://www.freewayactions.com
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Hi Tim, Thanks. Are you talking about the Anti Spam action?
What is best to use it on the page or just the form?
If I do both will it still work or do you have to choose one?
Regards,
Ronald
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Hi Ronald,
Apologies for the confusion. I was talking about the PHP Feedback Form Action;
http://www.freewayactions.com/product.php?id=019
The Anti Spam Action doesn’t have any features to combat form spam although it can encode email addresses found in form fields which, although worth mentioning, isn’t going to help with your spam issues.
Regards,
Tim.
On 4 Jun 2013, at 16:02, Ronald Botman wrote:
Thanks. Are you talking about the Anti Spam action?
FreewayStyle.com - Freeway templates and parts to download, use and explore - http://www.freewaystyle.com
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I’m a designer not a developer and I thought this was going to be easy. Can someone help me go step by step using easiform Captcha? I’ve tried “http://easibase.com/freeway/freeway_form.php” and they only go to a certain point and I get lost. I get to step nine and he says and now your pretty much finished, until i want to see if my ioncube loader is working. How do I do that? How do I know which script to use? How do I place the ioncube folder on the server? I used filezilla to upload the files to my site server on godaddy and I get an error that says, “The required loader has not been detected for this script, please make sure you have the ioncube folder containing the required loader for your servers system.”
At a loss,
thanks in advance
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Sorry, I didn’t mean to place the easiform quesstions on this thread.
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