Hey all,
I’m trying to rebuilt my wife’s website with the demo of blocs 3 and I wonder if there’s a way to obscure email links or add something to the form that prevents bots farming email Adresse or contact form spamming.
Recaptcha is not an option for me because of google and the GDPR.
I’d prefer a solution like on the current contact form site which is here: Domain Details Page
And @Norm: how did you create the cookie note on the blocsapp homepage?
Try this one for cookie consent
No ideas on how to obsucre emails in text to make them unreadable for bots?
If you use the built in form, there is no need to even display an email address. When you create the form you supply an email address to where the form should be forwarded, but it doesn’t appear in the HTML of the page - It gets buried into the script created when you publish. If you want to display an email address (I know some governments insist on websites doing this) Then its probably easiest to create your contact info as an image and add that to your page. This, of course, isn’t foolproof. There are many spammers who simply employ people to visit websites and extract the email addresses manually. Personally, I would go the forms route and not show an email address. If you are forced to by legislation then use a cloaked email address that diverts to your real address. That way, if you start getting uncontrollable amounts of spam, you can change the cloaked email on your site.
Obfuscation through html can be useful, not used this in Blocs, but I have used this in ‘hand rolled’ sites:
http://www.hjkeen.net/htoys/obfuscat.htm
I guess this would work via the html bric.
Captcha could be viable in your forms, easiest method I can think of. You can have hidden fields that a bot will fill out, but can’t be seen by a human visitor. More on this here: Easy Spam Prevention Using Hidden Form Fields — SitePoint
I guess this obfuscation method is really more applicable to those who may want to provide an email link that opens an email client installed on the users device. I find it’s better to use Blocs built-in form script and have users complete a form within the site. The email addresses are automatically obfuscated as they are buried in the script, rather than displayed on the page or shown in the underlying page HTML.
Site forms are always vulnerable to spamming because they can be effectively completed by automated bots. However, as long as you don’t use an automated reply, most spammers will stay away from such forms. Their objective is to see if the form is responded to with a copy of the original message. If it does, they will target the form to try and make it into a spam gateway.
If spam bots do start filling up your forms and sending hundreds of responses, you could implement an alternative script which has many more security features. One such script which I effectively use in Blocs sites is Tectite FormMail. This script can sort out almost all of the spam from the real responses and discard those that are potential trouble. I find this far more effective than captcha or recaptcha solutions.
I like the look of Tectite - thanks