Does anyone know what this is?

[Mass Appeal Designs]

Hi young entrepreneurs of tomorrow

I have a form on my website thats only been up for a week or two, I have recently been getting a filled in form sent to me everyday with different email addresses and random website address but the same gibberish in the 'additional & misc fields'.

The actual content is below:

Additional: tediousness shadowable demission slopely purfly tumidity somethingness dragsman<a href= http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Bluffs/8924/ozzy.html >The Wizard's Land of Ozzy</a> http://www.nathanwildhouse.com/
Company: Judy Mcneil
Email: [email protected]
Found: Ingrid Garner
Misc: tediousness shadowable demission slopely purfly tumidity somethingness dragsman<a href= http://www.yourinter.net/farnsworth/ >The Farnsworth House</a> http://www.austria.info/xxl/_site/au/_area/412316/_subArea/416836/_aid/308794/index.html
Name: Latanya James
No: No
Product: Mag
Submit: Submit
Yes: Yes

All 4 emails i have had have the same text that is in the additional & misc field and I can not reply to any of the email addresses. Anyone had anything similar, I know there is not anything wrong with the form as I have had form submissions sent to me with no problems

Cheers in advance

Darren

 

[Ken Liu]

you're experiencing the joys of form spam

i tend to live with it as the genuine queries outweigh spam or incorporate a CAPTCHA

 

[TopGearMedia]

Yes - the joys of spam!

Its basically a computer randomly scanning websites for a contact form like yours, when it find one it dumps loads of useless information and submits it to your email - I solved this by adding a picture validator onto my form - you may have seen these as its getting a common way to stop 'bots' from submitting data.

Before sending the form you will be asked to verify the text on an image, as 'bots' cant yet read images they stumble at this stage but humans type the text in and job done, you should only get genuine submissions.

Ask your web designer if he is capable of this if not ask around on here and I am sure a user may be able to help you.

Regards

Gareth

 

[Mass Appeal Designs]

Cheers mate designed everything myself so will get on to that, what is the point of it though, is it so you visit the websites? they all mostly look pretty cheap anyhow

 

[TopGearMedia]

Yes, well any form of spam is based on volume, if they get 0.5% of the 1 million forms submitting on their website then they consider this a worth the expenditure of creating the spam in the 1st place. I can't imagine that they get a good conversion rate but that’s spam!

 

[IainW]

Yes - the joys of spam!

Its basically a computer randomly scanning websites for a contact form like yours, when it find one it dumps loads of useless information and submits it to your email - I solved this by adding a picture validator onto my form - you may have seen these as its getting a common way to stop 'bots' from submitting data.

Before sending the form you will be asked to verify the text on an image, as 'bots' cant yet read images they stumble at this stage but humans type the text in and job done, you should only get genuine submissions.

Ask your web designer if he is capable of this if not ask around on here and I am sure a user may be able to help you.

Regards

Gareth

I spoke to my web guys about a CATCHA and they said i could possibly lose customers cos they can't work it well or work the numbers and letters out, thus, loss of an enquiry. I only get about 2 a day spam forms, so will leave it at present.

Have you seen a reduction in genuine requests cos of your catcha?

I have built my holiday site on it being as simple as can be, i don't understimate how many customers just don't understand certain elements of a website.

Iain

 

[Mass Appeal Designs]

Have to admit when i have had to fill forms in I have struggled badly trying to read them things properly, maybe thats because I got real bad eye problems, but some of them are like a puzzle on the Krypton Factor

 

[Quizarea]

I Belive that you may put a time limit on how long it takes to type in a question, the spammers do it in 0.1 of a second or so i am lead to belive.

On our website you must take 4 seconds to fill in a form or more ,else it is rejected as spam.

Hope it helps
Pete

 

[Silk]

It depends on the CAPTCHA. Ours is based on clearly defined word rather than a jumble of useless upper and lowercase letters are are often hard to read. We were getting loads of spam (sometimes 30 or 40 a day), CAPTCHA killed it dead.

Silk

 

[IainW]

I Belive that you may put a time limit on how long it takes to type in a question, the spammers do it in 0.1 of a second or so i am lead to belive.

On our website you must take 4 seconds to fill in a form or more ,else it is rejected as spam.

Hope it helps
Pete

Hmmmm nice one Pete, i will spk to my web guys about this, worth looking into, possibly a better alternative.

 

[springbrook99]

You could put in other checks like looking for website strings in certain fields and then bounce it if it doesn't conform. i.e. if a telephone field or comments contains "http".. then chances are it's junk so program your processing script to ignore it and not forward.

 

[kevin555]

Just implemented a little trick I picked up on a web developers forum - basically you put in a hidden text field.

Simply wrap a <input type="text" name="email"> in a hidden <div>.

Normal users won't see the hidden field and are unaffected. Robots will enter stuff into the field.

Now do some php or asp code to check whether the field is filled or unfilled on submit. If filled, reject the form or pretend it has worked.

It seems to have stopped me getting a lot of this rubbish coming through.

Not sure if I can post details of the forum I saw this on but I expect google it and you will find something similar.

I decided against the captcha because I wanted to implement something where customers are least affected.

 

[itaufait]

Before sending the form you will be asked to verify the text on an image, as 'bots' cant yet read images they stumble at this stage but humans type the text in and job done, you should only get genuine submissions.

That's not strictly true, a lot of CAPTCHAs have actually been broken, but there are other ways to tell whether the data in the form is legitimate.

 

[AndYc42]

This is spam bot trying to send a message trough your form you can probably stop this from happening by using a captch script you will have seen these where you fill in a form on line and you have to type in letters from an image - like you did when you joined here.