Reverse Turing Test to help prevent form spam

[chris]

Form spam (also known as comment spam) is the posting of unwanted form data and is often done in bulk by machine. Form spam prevention is a broad topic with numerous proposed solutions, including the increasingly wide use of CAPTCHAs, which are images with letters and numbers that a human must recognize and enter into a form field. The basic idea is that a human will be readily able to do so and a computer will not.

One way to help prevent form spam in Mad Blanks forms would be to add an additional question to the form that a spammer's computer program would not understand. The question could be a simple math problem or a question such as, "What is the fourth word in this sentence?"

The part that would prevent spam from the Mad Blanks form from being submitted to your site would be the use of server-side form validation. The correct answer to the question would have to match the regular expression attached to the corresponding field. If there was no match, the form would never be accepted by Mad Blanks.

If the question were, "What is 4 times 7?" the regular expression would be

Code:

/^28$/

If the question were, "What is the fourth word in this sentence?" the regular expression would be

Code:

/^fourth$/

or

Code:

/^fourth$/i

to make it case insensitive.

This is a basic idea of something that can help to reduce the number of spam submissions to your website.

[jubert123]

                            Thank you for the tips in preventing spam message.

_________________
Indianapolis Web Design

[jjmorga]

hello again Chris,

Good idea as porn bots have already started filling out my survey. I used the question:
                        What is the fifth word in this sentence?

my "Regular Expression" is as you suggested:    /^word$/i

for the surveys that get submitted correctly, how do I keep this question's answer, "word" from displaying on the front end?

thanks again,
JM

[chris]

hello again Chris,

Good idea as porn bots have already started filling out my survey. I used the question:
                        What is the fifth word in this sentence?

my "Regular Expression" is as you suggested:    /^word$/i

for the surveys that get submitted correctly, how do I keep this question's answer, "word" from displaying on the front end?

thanks again,
JM

Well that's a good question, and a complete oversight on my part. I'll have to address that in the next release.

Oftentimes, people use the Score Scripting capability without displaying any records on the front end, and that is what I was thinking about when I programmed the validation feature.

As a workaround, you could use a component like ReReplacer to search for the term and remove it from Joomla's output. Perhaps place some distinctive text in the Text/HTML that comes before the field and the Text/HTML that comes after the field, and then search for and remove the whole combined string with ReReplacer.

You may need to enable the Mad Blanks configuration variable mbApplyContentPlugins for that strategy to work.

[jjmorga]

mmmm....

well I took your "distinctive text in the Text/HTML that comes before the field and the Text/HTML that comes after the field" advice and just changed the text to white <font color="white"> on an already white background.

thanks 

JM