[thelist] are bots submitting my form?

[Casey]

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?