Beating Spam on Websites
// March 12th, 2011 // No Comments » // Random, technology, website
So I’ve been getting about 15 emails a day about some new user registration for my fraternity forum. We currently use phpBB and it works well. But no matter what Anti-Spam Image I used, ones built into phpBB, the bots still got around it somehow.
Well I hated getting all these users accounts in the forum for no reason. So I was looking around in the ACP the other day and found the anti-spam method of just questions and answers. On websites in the past, I have seen some do a simple math question. So I took this idea and ran with it. I remove the image and just add one question.
“What is 2 + 4?”
Simple as that. I have yet to receive anymore spam users and the real users haven’t messed up the answer yet either, haha.
This simple idea is great to use if you are getting a lot of spam. It doesn’t 100% but you could also use the ASCII chars to output numbers and plus sign to throw off the spambots even more.
What are you ways of dealing with spam?