Need help with making website form more secure?

Question

I have a small buiness, providing birth support to local families. On my website, I have a "Want more Info?" form for people wo fill out so I can send them more information or talk with them on the phone. The past week I have been getting tons of fake submissions, from people wanting me to visit their porn sites. How can I make my form more secure so these people can't send me SPAM through it? I have limited knowledge of html, enough to make the website myself. I am hosting it through yahoo.

Answer 1

Most hosted websites use a program called formail to process the online forms. There is is a way to add security, but generally it has to be done by a perl script. Contact your hosting provider and they may be able to do this pretty inexpensively

Answer 2

Unfortunately in order to make the form accessible and generic enough for the general population to use there's really not much you can do.

One method is to use some type of ASP, Perl, Java application to write to database and/or text files instead of an email form. This would allow you to remove the email address from the website.

Another trick is have the email address is a format that the spam bots can't use. For example, in the website form you have the email address used to send the message to. This is how the spam bots are finding the address. Put the email address into two different variables in javascript. Then when the form is executed, run a short javascript routing that will concatenate the two pieces of the email address together and the submit the form for emailing.

Do a search on 'Javascript email address' and see what comes up. You might find a pre-scripted routine that you can use on your website that would fit your minimal knowledge requirement.

Good luck and I hope this helps!

Answer 3

Get on and use Ubuntu Linux. Get a better web host, the one you are using is not set up correctly. Use SSH and SSL when communicating with others. Make a backup of all data. Computers crash, get virus wiped, become unstable, the only real protection of data is a good backup routine. Start one and stick to it.
Sites get spam, that is part of the Information Age. Filtering the spam is the proactive measure that you have to implement.
On the site, email addresses should be me[@]mysite.[com] or something to mask the address from the bots.
Look at other sites, they say me (AT) somesite(DOT) com, or some code to hide from the ad bots and spam bots.
Best thing you can do is get Ubuntu Linux, start learning what is the Industry Standard, Linux for your hosting and website management.