Form Spamming

Form Spamming

Form Spamming is defined as a computer automated posting to blogs, forms and wikis, whether as a result of commercial promotion, or harassment and vandalism. Like all spam, we are seeing this more and more, albeit reported in less than 1% of our clients to date. You can easily tell an email spam response to an eVetsite form in that it contains many random names and URL links:

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At this time we are tracking this issue to see if there is some pattern but it seems to be very random, and also stops for no apparent reason as well. We have seen form spam from our own demo website twice in 4 years (not a major issue yet). In the office we just delete the spam email and move on to the next item.

THE QUICK FIX:

The quick and easy fix is to rename the forms page as displayed on your website. This way the spammer bots will have to relocate the page which is unlikely any time soon. You can do this by going to your forms page and click on and change the Menu Display:

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THE MAJOR FIX:

The major fix is for us to put CAPTCHA into all our forms. CAPTCHAs are used on many websites to prevent automated software from performing actions on their forms. Many people find having to use a CAPTCHA to be a bit annoying, so we want to monitor this situation a while longer before we make a global decision to include CAPTCHA in all our websites.

At this time we have CAPTCHA on our web page to prevent form spamming. You may have seen this feature as part of your Testimonial page: