Submitting malicious information to a website’s user registration form is called Form Spam. These form submissions contain false information and may contain abusive language, advertisements for other websites, or links to phishing websites and sites that download malware. Scammers use spam on websites for a variety of reasons, including spreading malware, stealing personal information, placing invisible links, and even taking control of the website.
How do they do Spamming?
Spam can be spread manually by human users or automatically by bots that are programmed to search for and attack website vulnerabilities.
- Manual spamming occurs when humans manually fill out and submit web forms with false information and harmful links. Manual spammers frequently attempt to build links back to a specific website, but they may also distribute malware and links to malicious websites.
- Spambots are programs that automatically search the internet for forms, comment sections, and other places to submit data. These bots can be programmed to leave spam text and links in the form of submissions and comments, as well as more malicious activities like stealing personal information, spreading malware, or taking control of a website.
Is it important to stop spamming? Well, Yes!
Stopping form spam benefits both your website and its visitors. One reason is that form spam can negatively impact your website’s user experience. If you allow unmoderated comments and testimonials on your website, both can become inundated with spam messages containing advertisements, junk text, and links. Users will become irritated by the presence of spam and will visit your website less frequently. High spam traffic and submissions can also slow your website and bury legitimate contact forms, causing you to respond to real users more slowly. Users will become dissatisfied if you take too long to respond to their form submissions.
These are some of the actions that can help to prevent form spam on a website.
Google ReCAPTCHA
The reCAPTCHA is simply a button that users must click to confirm that they are not robots. This is simpler and less time-consuming for users while still effectively blocking the majority of spam submissions.
Don’t Allow Links
One of the main goals of spammers is to place unauthorized links on websites. Allowing links in form submissions, testimonials, and comment sections is one way to prevent this. This is effective for preventing spam bots and manual spammers from adding links to your website.
Confirm Email Addresses
Spammers and spam bots frequently use bogus or disposable email addresses on contact form submissions. You can prevent this by including an additional step in the submission process to confirm user email addresses. You can do this by immediately sending an email to the form’s email address with a link to complete the submission. To complete the form, users must log into their email and open the message in order to click on this link.
Limit And Block IP Addresses
You can aid in the prevention of spam from a single source by restricting IP addresses to a certain number of form submissions in a given timeframe and blocking IP addresses that exceed this limit. You can also immediately block IP addresses if their activity is suspicious.
Make use of honeypots
Honeypots are an excellent spam protection alternative to CAPTCHAs that will cause no inconvenience to your users. Honeypots are essentially pieces of code that display additional forms that only spambots see. When this additional form appears, the spambot will fill out all of the fields and submit the form automatically. Once the form is submitted, the presence of the additional information causes it to be flagged and rejected automatically, saving you time from dealing with spam submissions.
Honeypots will not bother legitimate users because they are designed to only appear to bots. Using honeypots will provide a more convenient experience for users because the hidden form will not bother them and you will not need to use a reCAPTCHA. This can help increase the number of forms that are legitimately submitted.
Use Time Analysis
Implementing time analysis to track the amount of time it takes to fill out and submit the form can help distinguish spam form submissions from legitimate form submissions. In general, humans should take longer to complete a form than a spambot, which will fill every form field instantly. The timer should begin when a user clicks on the form and end when the form is submitted. The one issue with this is that the autocomplete option allows legitimate users to fill out forms almost instantly, making it difficult to distinguish this from spambot submissions.
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