Globi's Newsletter :: Volume 5, Number 8.1 - September 2005 ::

Thank You for Your Interest in Empowering Your Business on the Web
And thank you for your interest in receiving this newsletter.

A New Form of Abuse

If the biggest action your website's Contact Form is getting these days is the insatiable spammers, then you must read this to ensure that you're protected.

It seems there's no end to viruses and spam. Only a few years ago it was still okay to publish your email address on your website. Soon enough spiders started trolling the web for them and spammers followed with their unwanted solicitations, so we stopped publishing our email addresses.

Without public addresses, it was rather difficult for visitors to get hold of us, so the industry adopted contact forms as the next way of communications. These were even better than regular email because you could also ask specific questions and lead prospects in certain directions before even speaking with them live.

For a long time, the only drawback to contact forms was that spiders could trigger them, resulting in blank emails being sent to the site owner. No big deal really as this didn't happen too often.

However, when it did start happening more prevalently, a simple check or * on a required field was all that was needed to stop this mechanical triggering, as a program would not be intelligent enough to figure out that it had to submit information in order to pass to the next step.

The Temporary Fix

These days you'll find that most contact forms go as far as to validate a submitter's email address to assure that the form is human submitted and not machine triggered. However, it seems this solution didn't even sustain for a year.

Now the latest breed of virus and some spiders are capable of filling in proper email addresses to trigger contact forms en mass just to try and get to the next page. This is such a nuisance, and unfortunately there are really only 3 options available to us.

Option 1 - Monkey See, Monkey Do

Some sites now show you an obscure image that contains letters and numbers, and you are required to type in what you see as a test to prove you're human. This adds an extra step, is annoying, and is down-right frustrating when the lettering is so obscured that you can't even read it (which makes you question whether you're human after all). We would not suggest this route as it will significantly reduce the amount of true human contact that your forms deliver.

Option 2 - Rules, rules, rules

This option is to add logic to contact forms so that they have to adhere to more strict rules in an effort to reduce machine contact. Although this may only be temporary, a fairly strict rule-set could stamp out form-spam for a long time to come. Even simple rules like ensuring phone numbers have only numbers, names don't have odd characters like the almighty @, and similar rules, should stop spiders in their tracks.

Option 3 - Get over it

This is to consider simply hitting the delete key when garbage comes in. While this may not be a permanent solution, nor a high-tech one, it certainly is effective. Essentially, it all boils down to how much of a nuisance your form-spam really poses to you.

One important thing to pay particular attention to though is the reason that spammers are doing this in the first place. Usually it is in an effort to exploit a security hole on a contact form to use it to send out spam from your site which can subsequently put you at risk of having your website shut down completely. So, at the very least, make sure that your site is secure.

Just like Microsoft issues security patches regularly, it is a good idea to have a security audit of your own site every once in a while. Even though your site may have been secure when developed, the ever-idle hands and resourcefulness of hackers can change this in the blink of an eye.

Hey - share the Wealth!

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Until next month, we remain your humble messenger to the internet.

Globi Web Solutions
1023 - 12th Ave SW
Calgary, Alberta, T2R 0J5
Phone: (403) 229-3800
E-mail: admin@globi.ca
Web Site: http://www.globi.ca

Copyright © 2010 Globi Web Solutions. All Rights Reserved. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced in whole or in part without the inclusion of Globi Web Solutions' Reprint Permission below.

Reprint Permission

Although this material is subject to copyright, please feel free to reprint this publication, in whole or in part, in your company publication, in training, presentations, or wherever you feel this would be of benefit. This also holds true for members of the media. All we ask (actually, we insist) is that you use the following credit line:

Reprinted with permission from Globi Web Solutions, a leading Website Design and Development Company based in Calgary. For further resources and information, go to globi.ca. Copyright © 2010 Globi Web Solutions.