I am here to announce that I have decreased #spam on my web contact form from 1 message every 15 minutes (for months straight) to 0 messages in the last week by adding a "I am a spam bot" radio button. I am not joking. No I am not using something like […] [Original post on social.avali.zone] - ThreadSky

avali.zone • 62 days ago

I am here to announce that I have decreased #spam on my web contact form from 1 message every 15 minutes (for months straight) to 0 messages in the last week by adding a "I am a spam bot" radio button.

I am not joking.

No I am not using something like […] https://social.avali.zone/@avali/113752197580397306

Comments

TimWardCam.c.im.ap.brid.gy•61 days ago

@avali Interesting. I've never had any bot spam from the form on my web site (just the occasional manual spam, but I haven't seen even one of those for years).

There's some elementary validation - there's an email address field for which some sort of DNS lookup has to succeed (dunno what […]

avali.zone•61 days ago

@TimWardCam I avoided spam for quite a while there as well! Eventually though, I ended up getting occasional (like once per week or two?) messages advertising some garbage SEO service (and similar). Oh and about

After a month or two of that, someone just started blasting the form with "I would […]

krissmanngupta.bsky.social•61 days ago

Hey! (sorry for sales comment but give a try)

I have curated a list of 1500+ directories to list your startup. I will manually list your startup to best 200+ directories with high domain authority and relevancy.

We are also running offer. You can visit https://getmorebacklinks.org for the same.

avali.zone•62 days ago

UPDATE: I have just got my first spam message, literally just the word burger in every field... but filed under copyright? Yeah sure whatever....

avali.zone•62 days ago

In case you are wondering, the backend code when you submit that form is basically:

if (YouClaimToBeASpamBot) {
return success;
}
else {
SendTheMessageToMe();
return success;
}

jef.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy•60 days ago

@avali That's pretty good. My system asks a trivial math question like "What is 2 plus 3?" To avoid having to keep state server side I made a teeny cryptosystem to put the encrypted answer in the form too. And there's some stuff to prevent replay attacks. Yours is a lot simpler!

JDGooiker.waag.social.ap.brid.gy•61 days ago

@avali briljant!

mld.social.mldchan.dev.ap.brid.gy•61 days ago

@[email protected]
Gonna ditch Cloudflare Turnstile for this

renedario.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy•60 days ago

@avali that's a great solution

dragonarchitect.rubber.social.ap.brid.gy•61 days ago

@avali I need to actually remember this for my own site if I ever do something like this... 🤔🤔🤔🤔

FiniteLooper.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy•61 days ago

@avali I’ve done something similar with just adding a checkbox that is only visibly hidden with CSS. No human will see it, so only a robot can check it. Checked = spam

Infrapink.mastodon.ie.ap.brid.gy•61 days ago

@avali That is brilliant!👍

phillycodehound.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy•61 days ago

@avali @thurrott Clever

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