Web Forms and spammers

Some time ago, I designed and implemented a couple of web forms, to make it easier for people to send enquiries directly from the browser without having to start up their email client.

For a long time it worked well, until that is the spam bots found it. Now I can receive dozens of "enquiries" a day that are the usual list of links to casino's, porn sites, viagara, get rich quick schemes etc.

Now much as a despise the spammers, I at least know the motive behind their the comments they post to blogs etc. It is of course a dubious tactic to increase their link count in the hope of improving the ranking of their puerile sites with the search engines. The forms however are only forwarded to me, and do not appear on any website and gain them nothing, other than "pissing me off".

This blog has protection "built in" against spammers. My email has three tiers of protection from spam (so only about 20 or so a day get through), but my webform was unfortunately unprotected and so became the latest target for these low lives.

Here's to spamhaus, keep up the fight.