UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums Resources and Customizing Admin Zone Just a tip for you Forms people sans Captcha

Sometimes a Captcha is a pain in the arse to add, but you still want to keep bots from signing up on your forms and want a way to somehow filter them out from the real people.

I use this and it works a high percentage of the time.

What you do in the basic form is to have your text boxes have name/ids that are like "xxName", "xxAge" etc etc.. the user really doesn't know or care what you name the fields anyway..

Then what you do is also add some hidden fields that bots tend to like to fill in too.. they are kinda dumb that way (don't know why).. those fields (hidden) are name/ids of "name", "age" etc etc..

Now when the forum submits and if any of those hidden fields are filled in (ie: a bot stopped by and just slammed in values), you can decide to NOT take the info and put it in your DB or backend. Heck, you can even give them the nice 'Thank you for registering (you sh*thead)' screen



ps: kudos to my friend WoLPH-UNiT for the original idea.

gotta love these tricks!

yah, the bot code is sailing along doing getElementById stuff and not really caring if type="hidden"

so it kinda trips them up

well, even if they do care, you can hide it regardless of whether you make the type hidden or not.

Maybe a good strategy to do right away, because spambots might be stupid, but they learn.

yah, matter of fact i forgot to mention this.

it's even better to use css to do the 'hiding', because spambots don't normally want to delve into the DOM that far.

so rather than type="hidden", i do class="good-[censored]" or whatever..

then the .css does the display:none;

it makes them have to think even more

yeh but a lot of the time the creators of the bots set the items up manually, so it depends on if they actually want to target your site specifically

i knew giz had a 'yah, but' left in him.. i didn't claim it to be the end all.. just a thingie to file away for future use..

Always do punkin ... and hey, the captcha in ubb7 was one of my "rick, please please please please" features, so this thread is a "yeah, but" in itself ...

you sound like lou costello.. "heeeey yaaaaah buuuut..."

(old guy joke)

:cracks whip: yeaho boy

It actually is a good idea. I haven't used it but a private paid site I joined actually wrote about this and posted for their users a few years ago. Guess they were ahead of the game.

Well I'm going to probably try and setup all the CAPTCHA and Gallery stuff for a production site I Admin for tonight.