Question

Photo of Don Smallman

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Contact form

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Hi, are any other Churches getting a lot of weird requestes (Just random stuff) from people using your contact form?  Does anyone know of a way to stop some of it?  How do you handle these items in your workflow?

  • Photo of Jim Michael

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    Bots finding forms on web sites and filling them out are just a sad fact of the modern Internet. Most of these (for us, at least) are caught by our inbound spam filters, but not all. 

    I suppose you could add a captcha to the form but the good ones are almost as difficult for humans to decipher as they are for a bot, and create significant friction for end users. I don't think there is a perfect solution whenever you have a public form that generated email. 

    • Nick Airdo

      Nick Airdo

      Regarding Jim's "captcha" answer, we've had success dealing with this situation in another system by adding an extra field (like email address) and styling it as hidden. Then upon form submit (on the server side) we check to see if there is a value in this hidden field. If there is, we know it was a bot so we discard it (because most bots don't 'understand' styling and generally fill out every field in a form).

      • Jim Michael

        Jim Michael

        That sounds like a cool trick! Definitely worth a try. On the other hand, if it's a popular trick I can imagine that bots are programmed to recognize a hidden field and purposely not fill it out ;-)

        • Don Smallman

          Don Smallman

          Thanks everyone. My issue (I don't believe) isn't with bots. I think these are real people that just seem to go from church site to church site. Based on the text and names used, I don't think they are bots.