[thelist] are bots submitting my form?

[Paul Clerkin - HR Adworks]

They could also be trying to subvert the form to use it to spam - in a lot
of mailforms, there is a "hole" allowing  the malicious to subvert the
comments or feedback fields add add email addresses to receive their odious
news...







-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Casey
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 11:39 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] are bots submitting my form?


Hi Liz,

Yes, it's a good chance bots are submitting your form.  What you are seeing
is not at all unusual, and as I understand it, they are hoping to discover
the email address to which the form content is being sent.  Once they have
the email address, of course, they can sell it to spammers.

The best way I know of to stop this is to use a required field which asks
the user to enter the contents of an image.  You may have seen this
before.... the page displays an image with a distorted word in it and then
asks you to enter what it says.  It's distorted to prevent bots from screen
scraping the value.  Unless the value is entered correctly the form will not

submit.

Hope that helps,

Casey


----- Original Message -----
From: <liz at zolabola.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 9:10 AM
Subject: [thelist] are bots submitting my form?


>I have a simple webform on a site ...using javascript it requires that
>a  few of the fields are filled in (the usual...name, email)
>
> But the darn form keeps coming in completely empty!!!  ...sometimes it
> comes in filled in with data, too ...so I know it works ...at least I
> think it does.  Feel free to try it.
>
> Are bots submitting it?  Does my site have a ghost?  Any ideas of what
> may be happening or how I can debug?

--

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