Stopping Form Spam

Restricting Submissions Based on Submitted Values

You can restrict form submissions based on the data being submitted via the security settings. This allows you to, for example, not accept any submissions where the email address is hotmail.com, yahoo.com, gmail.com or one of the other free email providers. In addition, this functionality can be used to block spam to your forms. For example, we recently had a customer who's forms were being spammed over and over by a bot. A bot is a computer program that finds online forms and submits to them in the hopes that the form data will be posted on line to a guestbook, forum or blog. The submissions almost always contain a bunch of links to the spammers website(s). Spammers do this, because many search engines rank sites higher if they have lots of incoming links. Of course, the search engines do not condone this type of linking. Here is an example of how one of logiforms customers stopped this spamming.

First, the screen shot below shows the data that was being submitted to the form. There were multiple submissions and the data was sometimes slightly different but they always referenced the same URL:



Setting Up the Security Filter
To block this type of spam, open the form in question, and navigate to the security options as shown below:



In the security section, click the 'Restricted Values' link to expand that section. Next we're going to add the URL of the spammer to the list of values to check for. We add it to the list and set the field we want to check (in this case, the comments field). We can also set a redirect URl to bounce the guest to if the form submission is denied. The settings are shown in the screenshot below. Now, any submission that contains the spam bots URL is automatically caught and redirected. No data is recorded on your logiforms account.



HINT: If the spammer changes their URL or you get more spam, you can add more restricted values to the list, seperating each one with a comma.