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RE: FAQ: How can I add a spam-blocker validation? Stop Russian human spammers.

clessley 09 Sep, 2021
Long-time Chronoforms v5 user. Yes I know, outdated...reasons.

Has anyone ever used the blacklist method suggested here: How can I add a spam-blocker validation written by Bob Janes?

Many of our multi-anti-spam efforts (honeypot + captchas + etc) are thwarted by human spam workers, especially from Russia, who just manually type/paste in our forms.

I have tested the tutorial listed above on existing forms, simple form and the most basic textarea box/submit but I can't seem to find the correct combination following the written instructions in the article. Spammy email test either sends regardless.

Trying to get some basic regex to block the offending alphabet in the blacklist: [БбГгДдЁёЖжПпФфИиЙйЛлЦцШшЩщЭэЮюЯя] but even the basic "http" block does not work in any attempt. I'm guessing its the order of the drop-ins in the form editor (Setup) that is wrong or its just not compatible anymore using PHP-7.4 (?).

If anyone has used it successfully or has a better solution to regex the Cyrillic alphabet, I'd love to know.
clessley 30 Sep, 2021
Thanks GreyHead for the link but I have tried using that very same method before.

Any idea why blocking even the simple default example of "http" in the blacklist discussed in the article does not work?

During the interim, I changed the meta encoding header of my static form to: < meta charset=" US-ASCII " > and also set up a Gmail filter on the characters (that has its own problems) and it seemed to help.

Is there an option to force the US-ASCII charset in chronoforms itself?
GreyHead 30 Sep, 2021
Hi clessley,

Sorry, I have no idea why blocking 'http' isn't working for you; it was OK when I wrote the FAQ.

I'm not aware of any built in way to force a character set in ChronoForms other than by checking for 'unwanted' text.

Bob
clessley 05 Oct, 2021
Ok, thank you for your replies. I appreciate your responses.
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