Web Form Spam

I am sure most of you get at least one spam message a day – me – I get hundreds. Now I have been around a while and have some very public email addresses (webmaster@, webserver@ etc.) so my spam may be greater than some. Well here at Tyndale we have been fighting another form of spam – form spam.

Web forms are a great way to gather information from our web visitors – sometimes we get information and send it off to staff or faculty – sometimes we take it and store it in a database – sometimes we even post that stored information on our web site directly – like Alumni news.

Web forms are also a great way for spammers to send their spam. The spammers write programs (spam-bots) that scour the web looking for forms to fill out making sure to include their message in the content. Their hope is that people will not check their form data and the spammers content will get posted online or sent through to email.

We have many forms throughout our web site. Some of these forms have been found by the spam-bots and have been receiving a great amount of spam entries. In an attempt to squash these we have installed Akismet – Akismet analyzes our form content to determine whether it is spam or not and sends back the result – we then determine what to do with that information. We log all the spam attempts and we record all real data as we normally would.

Here are some quick statistics regard spam attempts in the Alumni section of our web site:

Since September 28, 2006 we have blocked 20,291 attempts to submit spam through our forms. Today alone – from 12:01 am to 9:15 am we have blocked 147 attempts.

Are you having problems with a form on the Tyndale web site. Submit a HelpDesk request and let us know – we will work towards a solution for you.