[Phpwm] Securing feedback forms

[David Goodwin]

Jonathan Adjei wrote :
> 
> Is anyone using human-readble image checks, and how much of a turn off have
> you found them? I've just added one to a contact form and am wondering if
> these will end up on all my sites and what impact there will be to genuine
> usage. I personally find them a bit of a pain.
> 

I agree with the 'pain' sentiment; I've found many to be annoying and
hard to read correctly.

I suspect, it's probably safe to say that if you're using a popular
application (e.g. drupal, wordpress etc) then making minor changes to it
will result in spam being 'blocked'. In my case, with Drupal, I edited the
source code to add in a trivial check (3+3 = ?) to stop bots posting
rubbish. Since doing this, I've not received any spam - before I was
getting around 5 'spam' comments per day.

In most cases, the spammer(s) probably look to see what popular
applications are in use, write some script to automate e.g.
mail/comment/etc posting, and then let it loose on us (probably using
Google to provide a source of urls/sites to target).

Of course, if you're a very high profile/traffic site, making minor
deviations (like I did) probably wouldn't work, as spammers are likely
to target you in particular.

I believe the image checking breaks teh application for some
disabled/blind users.

thanks,
David.
-- 
David Goodwin 

[ david at codepoets dot co dot uk ]
[ http://www.codepoets.co.uk       ]