[thelist] how to prevent robots from submitting forms?

Timothy J. Luoma luomat at peak.org
Wed Dec 4 15:53:01 CST 2002


On Wed, 4 Dec 2002 14:42:32 -0500, Feingold Josh S
<Josh.S.Feingold at irs.gov> wrote:

>> I have various contact forms that seem to be followed by various
>> robots(search engines, etc).
>
> Are you sure that they are not being sent by users just hitting the
> submit button?  Check your logs and see what kinds of referer is being
> left.

There is no referrer field:

Here are some examples.

Feedback Form Results from Googlebot/2.1
(+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html) / 216.239.46.151 /

Feedback Form Results from Jigsaw/2.2.0 W3C_CSS_Validator_JFouffa/2.0 /
138.96.249.65 /

Feedback Form Results from ia_archiver / 209.237.238.162 /

Feedback Form Results from Openfind data gatherer, Openbot/3.0+(robot-
response at openfind.com.tw;+http://www.openfind.com.tw/robot.html) /
66.237.60.42 /


> OPEN QUESTION: Has anyone ever heard of robots submitting forms?
>
>> What's the best/easiest way to prevent this from happening?
>
> The only way to prevent the form being sent would be some Javascript
> requiring certain fields to have a value.  The alternative is to run
> server side scripts that ignore those entries that are left blank.

I supposed the SS solution would work even if JS was turned off.

I guess that's what I'll do then

TjL

--
Timothy J. Luoma




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