Freeola Guides
Contact Form Improvement and Guest Book Spam Prevention
It always amuses me that so called SEO 'experts/companies' resort to Spamming people to try to generate work!
Here is a recent example from a website 'contact form':
"Cecelia Maloney
[email protected]
0120120120
We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail."
A quick Google shows these are well known spammers so I have no problem listing their 'details' here.
There is a chance they are not really interested in SEO but just trying to elicit a response to see if the email address is active - either way I recommend you NEVER reply. A number of 'form' spammers just like to try and submit dodgy links - malicious and/or spam.
It seems Gmail email addresses are getting very popular with these spammers - and in my experience they are nearly all coming from Indian ISPs.
Once these spammers have the URL of your contact 'form' or 'guest book' they regularly return directly to the page to offer their services!
Recently I've started to maintain an .htaccess file so that I can manually deny access to these visitors - this stops them from even viewing my website.
This is what they get presented with if they try to return to my site:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
My .htaccess file denying these spammers access currently looks like this:
order allow,deny
deny from 122.173.
deny from 122.167.
deny from 122.163.
deny from 122.183.
deny from 122.161.
deny from 122.177.
deny from 122.160.
deny from 122.172.
deny from 122.169.
deny from 121.247.167
deny from 94.100.25.52
deny from 117.200.162
deny from 182.68.
deny from 182.68.94
deny from 182.64.239
allow from all
This works well for me - I guess they move on to easier pickings and I only have to add a new IP address every few months.
Please Note:
Obviously, if you need your website to be visible to certain countries (mostly India in my IP examples above) then you would need to be *very careful* using this method as it would be very easy to block legitimate visitors. Especially where I am using IP masks rather than full addresses.
If you are using Freeola's Standard formmail script you simply have to add this line to your form code which will add your visitors IP address to any submitted messages:
<input type="hidden" name="env_report" value="yes">
A quick Google on the address will then show you if it is a problem IP !
Just thought I would pass this on in case others are troubled by similar form spam, or if you have your own tips please let me know :¬)
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Excellent tip - I'm going to show my ignorance here but how do you gain access to the .htaccess file to input the message and denied IP addresses. Is this something for the relative novice to attempt?
sorry for the *very* late reply - I'm afraid Freeola's systems don't let people know when there's a question.
You just need notepad or a similar plain text editor to create an .htaccess file.
You then need an FTP client (I use Filezilla which is free and works well) to upload the file.
NB. If you are using a Freeola InstantPro site this facility isn't available to you.
If you haven't given up on this then the Freeola forum is the best place to ask questions :¬)
Regards,
Hmmm...
www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk
I thought I would update this article with my current IP list for the spammers that have found me:
order allow,deny
deny from 122.173.
deny from 122.167.
deny from 122.163.
deny from 122.183.
deny from 122.161.
deny from 122.162.
deny from 122.177.
deny from 122.160.
deny from 122.172.
deny from 122.169.
deny from 122.180.
deny from 121.247.167
deny from 94.100.25.52
deny from 117.200.162
deny from 182.68.
deny from 182.68.94
deny from 182.64.239
deny from 182.64.
deny from 46.21.144.176
deny from 109.73.68.18
deny from 193.105.210.125
deny from 109.200.2.42
deny from 109.73.68.18
deny from 91.207.7.254
deny from 146.0.73.231
deny from 195.182.22.3
deny from 178.137.202.244
deny from 108.178.53.114
deny from 91.237.249.69
deny from 141.105.66
deny from 141.105.67
deny from 31.192.104.188
deny from 188.143.232.33
deny from 91.237.249.182
allow from all
Hmmm...
http://www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk