Combating Form Spam. There has been a recent sharp increase in spam, some of which is by-passing Google Captcha, in particular from Russia. We have introduced our new Intelligent Spam Filter to help combat this. In the most obvious spam cases, when the spammer has wasted their time submitting the form we will automatically reject it without their knowledge. For other possible spam items, we will place them in the spam folder of the corresponding form in Forms & Processes.
Update March 2019
To recap, we previously introducing Akismet's filtering system on all sites and extended our own internal blocking techniques to stop spam comments being left. We have now gone a step further by introducing the StopForumSpam.com service to identify and block known bad actors from submitting spam.
- StopForumSpam & Akismet integration
Forms & user registrations now use the StopForumSpam and Akismet services to help protect against known bad email & IP addresses of spammers by blocking their submissions. NB This is currently in trial and currently set to disabled by default. Once the trial has completed it will be enabled by default on all sites
This is accessed in Admin > Connect > Utilities > StopForumSpam > Enable StopForumSpam on registrations - Rate limiting improvements
The login, register, forgot password & search programs have been redesigned so our our rate limit system more extensively block bots after a number of attempts within certain timeframes. - Preventing spam from being part of your mailing lists
Our subscriber system will now block known email TLD's (top level domains) with a high probability of being fake from polluting your subscriber lists, for example submissions from .ru domains.