You have to have a form on your website for people to send an email to a friend if they found something interesting. You can force people to be logged in (which is not a good option in my case). You can make time delay (this is not really urgent email, so it can wait for 5 minutes). Do you have this problem? How would you solve it?
Edit: I am mostly interested in stopping manual spam
Do you have a problem with automated scripting of your form, or people genuinely using it too much?
The simple solution to the bot problem is a Captcha, such as ReCaptcha. The user-friendliness is questionable, but it would perhaps solve your problem.
You can also use something different from all those captcha scripts. Let me tell you what I do:
- I create a md5 hash:
$secretWord='TryToHashMe';
$formID='myForm';
$md5Value=md5($secretWord.$formID);
echo '<input type="hidden" name="form-check" value="'.$md5Value.'">';
echo '<input type="hidden" name="bot-check" value="">';
those are 2 very simple ways because: 1) auto bots try to fill all your inputs and 2)the hash is not provided, this mean you have a post request from outside your site. The hashing could be extended with some session or cookie, too.
All the best!
I would recommend a Captcha or if you would like something a bit less intrusive, have a simple math problem(which changes) so you just have something like:
For spam protection: Type what Two Plus Two is here _________
I did this on my personal website and never had a problem(and I had a lot of attempts that failed by spambots)
This service has very good anti-spam measures.
http://www.tellafriendking.com/features.php?showall=1#spam-free
FYI, I am involved with the company, so I'm not entirely unbiased, but we do get a lot of refugees who come to us to end their spam problems with other services or downloaded scripts.
Edit:
If you feel the need to vote down, perhaps you should leave a comment too...
The best solution is to use an all-purpose bot filtering solution. I know this is an old post, but a new botnet was discovered that uses these send to a friend modules to send spam (not a new technique but some interesting new advancements).
According to one security vendor (good tips), “At a minimum, they should include a rate-limiting mechanism that will prevent an IP address from issuing unreasonable numbers of requests over a specific period of time. Other DIY solutions are to have all users fill in CAPTCHAs and to enforce registration as a prerequisite to sending out an email message.”
Related
I am new to this site and coding. I have self taught myself html and I understand css. I have been putting together a site of mine using my basic knowledge. I have no college experience but this is MY DREAM to put this site together so I have done a lot of research and read books to get started but I have hit a roadblock now. Here is what I have done:
-I have put together all of the front end pages and design using html/css. So, I have all of the pages that would be involved with the site, ready to go. All designed and have the layout how I wish it to be.
I guess I would call it the "skeleton" of the site. Any page that a user would be directed to, I have in a folder.
I have put together a little "demo" for myself to mimic a user experience. For example, I created a login page that "looks" how i want it to be but it doesnt actually store or save any logins.
This is my first question:
What is my next step? I admit it sounds stupd but I am self taught and I really have the ambition to acheive this I just can not figure out where to go from here in order to actually make a functioning site. All I have right now is my html "demo" where basically I have to follow a certain path down my site that mimics what a user would do on the site. I have it now where I click on the "sign up" button on my html form and it basically just redirects to my "new user" page. Then it is the same formula throughout the rest of my demo. I just put my other html pages I have designed into the html to sort of give a "user experience" to the demo. But I REALLY want to be able to have working accounts and saved data.
How do I create/save a user login to my site? DO i need to get a sql database? Is there a free one to use while i build the site? Honestly i really need someone who is willing to help me out with the steps in this journey without me sharing my entire site (i wish to keep it to my self) but.. i understand this is basic web stuff i just am genuinely lost as how to take it to the next level. I have all of the html done and now i need a way to actually make it work. I wish to conversate with someone please about this kink in the chain i am seeming to find myself in please. Thank you so much and I would be grateful. :)
----basically what programming languages do i need to learn, or when looking for someone to hire, what should they be skilled in? any software or sites or databases that i need? please help!!!
HTML and CSS are the languages that make up the front end of a website, like you said. In order for your website to have dynamic content (content specific to a user) and the ability to actually process logins, etc., there needs to be a server involved. A webpage is a text document that is interpreted by a browser. HTML makes up the content and CSS tells the browser how you want it to look. What you are missing, primarily, is server scripts, most commonly, in my experience, PHP. You can also include JavaScript for client-side effects.
Specific to your question about a user login, yes, you will need a database. The process should look something like this.
User visits login page
User enters information into an HTML form
User clicks submit
Form is submitted to a server URL using the 'POST' method
Server validates the form content
Server checks database for username or email (whichever you are using)
If the username/email exists, it compares the passwords
Server sends a response back to the client, either good or bad
Once the user is validated, you can redirect the user to the dashboard or user section.
Please keep in mind this is a very simplistic version of events. There are more in depth steps that need to be taken, for example, your passwords should never be stored in a database as plain text, you should use a one-way encryption (hashing) algorithm to make them unreadable. Then when a password is given to the server it should be hashed and you should compare the hashes. You can also use salts when hashing for more security. The form should use SSL to prevent man in the middle attacks, etc.
Sounds like you are off to a good start, but in order to make it work you have to add the server logic. Self-teaching will get you as far as you are willing to let it. I taught myself how to do web programming, and now I do it as a business. The Internet is a great resource. There are a ton of great tutorials online that will show you how to do everything I just laid out.
What's another way, instead of recaptcha, to protect the booting page?
My customers do not like to be filling these things out and I'm out of ideas
Without more details, it will be difficult to know what is appropriate for your situation. Here are some things that may or may not work for you depending on your situation:
Instead of a CAPTCHA use a simple question. Arithmetic perhaps. Or asking someone to type a word that is undistorted rather than distorted like a CAPTCHA. Or having someone always type the same word into a box. This is nowhere near as strong as a CAPTCHA, but it may be enough depending on your needs.
Password protect your site. Depending on your needs, you can use a shared password, individual accounts specific to your site, or something like Facebook Connect / OAuth / OpenID.
You can try a robots.txt file, but that will only keep well-behaved robots away. Attackers will, of course, ignore it.
You can firewall off your server so people can only access it from a certain subnet. If everyone using the site has access to the same VPN, then they can use VPN to access the site.
If you don't like any of #Trott's suggestions - A simple CAPTCHA replacement, but I am not sure for how long (a somewhat sophisticated attacker could crack it):
Add this into your form:
<input name="dummy" value="" style="display: hidden"/>
Then in your server code,
if params['dummy'].empty?
# user
else
# spambot!
end
This relies on spambots compulsively filling out unknown form fields (so that they don't leave out any mandatory ones); but a user will never see it, and thus always leave empty.
I want to stop spammers from using my site. But I find CAPTCHA very annoying. I am not just talking about the "type the text" type, but anything that requires the user to waste his time to prove himself human.
What can I do here?
Requiring Javascript to post data blocks a fair amount of spam bots while not interfering with most users.
You can also use an nifty trick:
<input type="text" id="not_human" name="name" />
<input type="text" name="actual_name" />
<style>
#not_human { display: none }
</style>
Most bots will populate the first field, so you can block them.
I combine a few methods that seem quite successful so far:
Provide an input field with the name email and hide it with CSS
display: none. When the form is submitted check if this field is
empty. Bots tend to fill this with a bogus emailaddress.
Provide another hidden input field which contains the time the page
is loaded. Check if the time between loading and submitting the page
is larger the minimum time it takes to fill in the form. I use
between 5 and 10 seconds.
Then check if the number of GET parameters are as you would expect.
If your forms action is POST and the underlying URL of your
submission page is index.php?p=guestbook&sub=submit, then you
expect 2 GET parameters. Bots try to add GET parameters so this
check would fail.
And finally, check if the HTTP_USER_AGENT is set, which bots sometimes don't set,
and that the HTTP_REFERER is the URL of the page of your form. Bots
sometimes just POST to the submission page causing the HTTP_REFERER
to be something else.
I got most of my information from http://www.braemoor.co.uk/software/antispam.shtml and http://www.nogbspam.com/.
Integrate the Akismet API to automatically filter your users' posts.
If you're looking for a .NET solution, the Ajax Control Toolkit has a control named NoBot.
NoBot is a control that attempts to provide CAPTCHA-like bot/spam prevention without requiring any user interaction. NoBot has the benefit of being completely invisible. NoBot is probably most relevant for low-traffic sites where blog/comment spam is a problem and 100% effectiveness is not required.
NoBot employs a few different anti-bot techniques:
Forcing the client's browser to perform a configurable JavaScript calculation and verifying the result as part of the postback. (Ex: the calculation may be a simple numeric one, or may also involve the DOM for added assurance that a browser is involved)
Enforcing a configurable delay between when a form is requested and when it can be posted back. (Ex: a human is unlikely to complete a form in less than two seconds)
Enforcing a configurable limit to the number of acceptable requests per IP address per unit of time. (Ex: a human is unlikely to submit the same form more than five times in one minute)
More discussion and demonstration at this blogpost by Jacques-Louis Chereau on NoBot.
<ajaxToolkit:NoBot
ID="NoBot2"
runat="server"
OnGenerateChallengeAndResponse="CustomChallengeResponse"
ResponseMinimumDelaySeconds="2"
CutoffWindowSeconds="60"
CutoffMaximumInstances="5" />
I would be careful using CSS or Javascript tricks to ensure a user is a genuine real life human, as you could be introducing accessibility issues, cross browser issues, etc. Not to mention spam bots can be fairly sophisticated, so employing cute little CSS display tricks may not even work anyway.
I would look into Akismet.
Also, you can be creative in the way you validate user data. For example, let's say you have a registration form that requires a user email and address. You can be fairly hardcore in how you validate the email address, even going so far as to ensure the domain is actually set up to receive mail, and that there is a mailbox on that domain that matches what was provided. You could also use Google Maps API to try and geolocate an address and ensure it's valid.
To take this even further, you could implement "hard" and "soft" validation errors. If the mail address doesn't match a regex validation string, then that's a hard fail. Not being able to check the DNS records of the domain to ensure it accepts mail, or that the mailbox exists, is a "soft" fail. When you encounter a soft fail, you could then ask for CAPTCHA validation. This would hopefully reduce the amount of times you'd have to push for CAPTCHA verification, because if you're getting enough activity on the site, valid people should be entering valid data at least some of the time!
I realize this is a rather old post, however, I came across an interesting solution called the "honey-pot captcha" that is easy to implement and doesn't require javascript:
Provide a hidden text box!
Most spambots will gladly complete the hidden text box allowing you to politely ignore them.
Most of your users will never even know the difference.
To prevent a user with a screen reader from falling into your trap simply label the text box "If you are human, leave blank" or something to that affect.
Tada! Non-intrusive spam-blocking! Here is the article:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3817/stopping-spambots-with-two-simple-captcha-alternatives
Since it is extremely hard to avoid it at 100% I recommend to read this IBM article posted 2 years ago titled 'Real Web 2.0: Battling Web spam', where visitor behavior and control workflow are analyzed well and concise
Web spam comes in many forms, including:
Spam articles and vandalized articles on wikis
Comment spam on Weblogs
Spam postings on forums, issue trackers, and other discussion sites
Referrer spam (when spam sites pretend to refer users to a target
site that lists referrers)
False user entries on social networks
Dealing with Web spam is very difficult, but a Web developer
neglects spam prevention at his or her
peril. In this article, and in a
second part to come later, I present
techniques, technologies, and services
to combat the many sorts of Web spam.
Also is linked a very interesting "...hashcash technique for minimizing spam on Wikis and such, in addition to e-mail."
How about a human readable question that tells the user to put in the first letter of the value he put in the first name field and the last letter of the last name field or something like this?
Or show some hidden fields which are filled with JavaScript with values like referer and so one. Check for equality of these fields with the ones you have stored in the session before.
If the values are empty, the user has no javascript. Then it would be no spam. But a bot will at least fill in some of them.
Surely you should select one thing Honeypot or BOTCHA.
There is one IP (from China) which is trying to download my entire website. It downloads all my pages and loads the server significantly (I have more than 500 000 pages). Looking at the access logs I can tell it's definitely not a Google bot or any other search engine bot.
Temporarily I've banned it (using iptables rules), but it's not a solution for me, because some of my real users also have the same IP, so they are also banned and cannot acces the website.
Is there any way to prevent such kind of "user activity"? Maybe a mechanism which implements captcha if you try to request more than 5 requests a second or something?
P.S. I'm using Yii framework (PHP).
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
thank you!
You have answered your own question!
Make captcha appear if the request exceeds certain number per second or per minute!
You should use CCaptchaAction to implement, like this.
I guess the best way to monitor for suspicious user activity is really user session, CWebUser's getState()/setState(). Store current request time in user session, compare it to several previous values, show captcha if user makes requests too often.
Create new component, preload it via CWebApplication::$preload and check user activity in components init() function. This way you'll be able to turn bot check on and off easily.
I first encountered the concept of lazy registration the Ajax Patterns site, where they define it as accumulating "bits of information about the user as they interact, with formal registration occurring later on." I'm looking at doing something similar for my website, but I'd like to know a little bit more about best practices before I start implementing it. My site is about web development, but general best practices are great too. How have you implemented lazy registration on your sites or projects? Where have you seen it in the wild? What do you like or dislike about it?
Have a look at this vid, a very good overview of the lazy registration pattern:
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/03/16/signup-forms-must-die-heres-how-we-killed-ours/
I say this not as a person who has designed such a site before, but as a person that might visit that site. :)
With that said, the thing that I would be the most concerned about is knowing what kind of information is being collected about me. And I think that there should be an option to opt out of collecting the information and instead entering it all during formal registration.
But other than that, if it makes registering for a website easier, I'd be all for it. I leave 9 out of 10 sites that require me to register to do stuff.
One way that I was thinking about implementing this is when users leave blog comments. A common Wordpress format is to allow site visitors to comment as long as they leave a name and an email address. If I followed a similar pattern and then after they submit their comment, ask them if they would also like to register by having username and password inputs right there, with their email pre-filled in the email address input. There would also be a message saying that if they choose not to register at that time, their email address won't be saved (other than in association with the blog comment). If you think of something to add to this, leave a comment.
Use OpenID.
I hate it when I have to enter the same data over and over again, and to think of new passwords because you (read: the website) likely store them as plaintext.
Oh, and please don't require me to give you a fake email.
Like this way www.soup.io/signup or the email way www.posterous.com or www.tripit.com