Someone spamming our websites through contact form

by StrategicMarketingTN Posted: 11 years ago 13 replies

I'm puzzled and hoping that someone can shed some light.

We have many of our own websites and we also host websites for our local business clients. The client's sites have no links to our sites so they are not connected in any way.

Every once in a while, we'll get spammed through the contact form submission to many of the sites. Usually, it's somebody trying to sell us some SEO or internet marketing service. Today, I had 10 submissions come through for a twitter service.

What I don't get is how do they happen to find our websites and our clients sites at the same time. Is it just the fact that we happen to appear on some scraped list and they blast so many that we happen to get a good number of them? It's just strange because the statistical probability of several of our client websites being on 1 list should be very small.

Any thoughts?

#main internet marketing discussion forum #contact #form #spamming #websites

visimedia 11 years ago

I don't have a technical solution for this but for manua; way I think we can temporarily shut the contact us page down for few days just to make sure they're not spamming you again.
Or you can find a way to block the certain IP or anything that you can trace him not to visit the page again.
- [1] reply
- talfighel 11 years ago
  
  Maybe that would work. Then they will just move on and not bother you. See if that works out.
  
  [1] reply
John Romaine 11 years ago

If this is one of the contact pages that is getting hammered, then you need *quite desperately* to get a CAPTCHA on there, pronto.

Contact Strategic Marketing Academy | Strategic Marketing Academy

Forget about where they're coming from, do that first.
- [3] replies
- vCr8 11 years ago
  
  For contact forms it is important to have captchas, image verifications or security questions which most sites use today... Have you checked if all the messages you received are from the same IP? If yes then it will be easy to block it check your email services but if not, it would be a harder task. BTW yes I think your emails were scraped..
- rdpayne 11 years ago
  
  Yes, this is actually how I feel as well. I really can't see it any other way.
- StrategicMarketingTN 11 years ago
  
  Thank you John, thump myself on the head, I didn't notice that we didn't have a captcha on that form.
  
  Got it fixed now.
  
  [1] reply
marketingmaniac 11 years ago

Here is an idea also in addition to the CAPTCHA idea, limit the number of charachters that can be typed into the body of the submission form, this can also cut your spam submissions down considerably, assuming you have access to controlling this in your submission form.

I hope this helps!
- [1] reply
- StrategicMarketingTN 11 years ago
  
  Interesting idea. Haven't thought of that. Thank you.

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Someone spamming our websites through contact form

StrategicMarketingTN • 11 years ago • 13 replies

I'm puzzled and hoping that someone can shed some light. We have many of our own websites and we also host websites for our local business clients. The client's sites have no links to our sites so they are not connected in any way.