kmichelles.com Blog

SpamBots Wont leave me Alone!

Lately I have had a huge amount of spam come through my email forms on my website, and in my guestbook. My Statcounter is not logging the visitors so I am assuming it is being done by robots. I have had to remove my guestbook completely and figure out how to make a new contact form. 

My host is Yahoo. They give you a guestbook and also process forms for your webpages. My guestbook started getting spammed very quickly after I started using it. I had it where I would approve the posts before they were actually posted which saved my guestbook, but it didnt save me from the incredible amount of spams that I had to go through and delete. There was no way to modify the process of the Yahoo guestbook to avoid spams so I began by erasing all of my links to my guestbook. This did no good. And I couldn’t actually erase the guestbook for some Yahoo reason, so I kept getting the spams. I finally made the guestbook private (which I had to figure out myself – no help from Yahoo customer support) and that stopped it.

Now as for the webform that Yahoo provides for you, that is also just a huge pile of crap once a spambot gets ahold of it. Yahoo gives you the code, and it links to some Yahoo form processor. Horrible! Once I started getting spam through that, I erased the links to my contact form, I erased my pages containing the form, and what do ya know – still got spam through it. And the form doesnt even exist anymore. How irritating. So I had to put a bogus email address in my profile that Yahoo sends the form results to. So enough with Yahoos crappy non spam proof garbage. I had to figure out how to implement a good php form on my website. I really don’t know php, but I have used php scripts and usually it takes me a good while to figure out how to make them work on my site. I am the type of person that when I’m determined to do something, I keep at it until I get it right. So anyway, I did find a script that I liked the sound of – karaFormSecure (kFS) 1.0.1. This script gave me what I had been looking for, it is php, and uses captchas. I also added some form validating script into my form to make sure all the fields are filled including my checkboxes, and that a valid email is entered into the email box. So I figured out how to install everything and configure it all in my website…it didnt work. No I didnt get spammed again, I actually wasnt able to recieve an email. I found that when using php script in my Yahoo hosted website to send emails, even if they are directed to myself, they have to be actually “from” or the return address has to be from my own domain. Its Yahoos way of not letting us “spam the whole world in one day” thing. So after sitting there stairing at my screen for a good 20 minutes, not knowing anything about php I had to figure out how to make the form say it was being sent from an email my domain even if a visitor sends me an email through it ,and submitting it with their own email address in it. So I did figure it out, yes I did. And I still don’t know anything about php. First I had to add a “hidden” field to my form with the “value” to equal a bogus email address in my own domain. Then I figured out what some of the commands meant in the php processing script, and made it read that address as the “from” address. It worked! I was so happy, am so happy.

Some other precautions I am thinking of taking to avoid spam is to definetely not let my new contact pages get indexed in the search engines, I wont name any of the contact pages “contact”, I probably wont have the word “contact” on the page at all actually. I will probably only have links leading to my contact form that are in my flash navigation (I’m actually not sure if that will help, but I think so).

After doing all this, I did discover a remedy that someone had mentioned in another blog. They said “use a flash form, problem solved”. That sound like it would probably work too.b The flash form would also be linked to php processing file. I am going to try that is the script I am using now doesnt work. I will keep you updated!