Wednesday, 02 May 2007 at 01:07
If you’re using the Zem Contact Reborn plugin with your Textpattern powered site, but are finally sick of the spam bots playing havoc with your lovely forms, this solution is close at hand. And has been for a while, although I didn’t realise it. :o)
Released all the way back in February 2006, pap_contact_cleaner is a cunningly simple way of foxing the merchants of spam. Those bots never actually look at your site; they just scan your form code, fill all the boxes and blam! You’ve got spam.
So how does pap_contact_cleaner help? Simple. It uses the API of zem_contact_reborn to insert two hidden form fields into your code. These fields do nothing at all, and no-one can see them except for us code monkeys and the spam bots.
Not being very clever, the spam bots fill in the details of these hidden fields, along with all of the others, meaning… no spam. Our friend pap_contact_cleaner stops the emails ever being sent if there’s content in them there hidden fields.
So join me, and cut down on your spam today.