Contact us = spam messages

[CaroleAs]

I noticed in the last week or so, that I am getting many spam messages through the Contact us page. Most of them are in foreign language (Russian or something like that) but some are in English and totally unrelated to the store content.

Is there a way to filter those or is it something I might have forgotten to set up? I never had that happen before, so I am a bit puzzled.

[answer=42]

I noticed in the last week or so, that I am getting many spam messages through the Contact us page. Most of them are in foreign language (Russian or something like that) but some are in English and totally unrelated to the store content.

Is there a way to filter those or is it something I might have forgotten to set up? I never had that happen before, so I am a bit puzzled.

Post#13 in this thread has a solution. https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread....for-spam/page2

[CaroleAs]

Thank you!

[Jeff_Mash]

I'm wondering if this solution isn't working any longer. The latest versions of ZC already incoporate a hidden field into the contact us form. And yet, we are still being bombarded with mostly Russian spam through the Contact Us form.

For the heck of it, I followed the instructions on Post #13 from your link above (by adding yet another hidden field), but this hasn't stopped the spam from coming.

Is anyone else using 1.5.5f still experiencing a high amount of spam coming through the Contact Us form (and mostly from Russia spambots)?

[CaroleAs]

I still have 1.5.5e and although i followed the instructions on that other thread, it didn't stop any spam email.
Any other ways to get rid of them?

[davewest]

I'm wondering if this solution isn't working any longer. The latest versions of ZC already incoporate a hidden field into the contact us form. And yet, we are still being bombarded with mostly Russian spam through the Contact Us form.

For the heck of it, I followed the instructions on Post #13 from your link above (by adding yet another hidden field), but this hasn't stopped the spam from coming.

Is anyone else using 1.5.5f still experiencing a high amount of spam coming through the Contact Us form (and mostly from Russia spambots)?

Keep in mind that not only are we talking about the hidden field, The code is open source! So yes its possible to teach our bots to look for that field and not use it..

You should change its name to something that seems common but not used in your site like dog_color, or URL and so on...

The field name if you are not sure is in the includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/templates/tpl_FORM_NAME.php
look for 'should_be_empty' and change it!

Then in includes/modules/pages/PAGE_NAME/header_php.php
look for and match 'should_be_empty' the what you used in the form.

$antiSpam = isset($_POST['should_be_empty']) ? zen_db_prepare_input($_POST['should_be_empty']) : '';

The same line is also in the includes/modules/create_account.php page

If you can use something like gedit to search in all files for 'should_be_empty' you can catch them all.

The other possible walk around is simply human bots are getting paid to click and enter can spam and hit the send button! Some just think this is a good way of advertising there bull, For them you can use a email address blocker.

[dbltoe]

Good info Dave!

Don't forget the tpl_product_reviews_write_default.php

[RixStix]

We added a global cpanel email filter to check for a few most common Russian characters & auto delete. There was already a filter for Chinese characters.

[schoolboy]

We have around 25,000 russian IP addresses denied - using IP Deny (although we manually edited htacess to get all these loaded). Similarly, a further 20,000 odd other IP's denied from known rogue regions (ukraine, korea, belarus - and similar).
Whenever we get a website-generated message from a (russian) bot, we add the IP (or IP range) to the htaccess file.
This has helped enormously in keeping many rogues away.
Anyone know of a global database of IP locations? If so, would be nice to create a htaccess block to deny all of these rouge countries - with russia at the top of that list...

[RixStix]

Anyone know of a global database of IP locations? If so, would be nice to create a htaccess block to deny all of these rouge countries - with russia at the top of that list...

Something like this?
http://www.wizcrafts.net/htaccess-blocklists.html

or this
http://www.wizcrafts.net/iptables-blocklists.html