Cogneato has dozens of sites with openly submittable forms on them, and they have no doubt all had some level of problems with spam submissions. Bots, and perhaps people, like to share their links or services, try to hack sites, or whatever other nefarious or annoying purposes they may have through forms, which require some sort of server side processing, and will possibly result in human processing as well, such as with sent emails, database data, or comments on a website.
Spammers have gotten more sophisticated over time, and over the last year or two, have really started to hit Cogneato’s sites hard and get past the protections we had in place. We’ve had to add protections on forms that didn’t have them before, and use more techniques to attempt to detect spam. We’ve recently added a set of checks of the submitted form data and the submitter IP address that produces a score of “spaminess” that we can then use to block the submission if the score is above a threshold. That score script is the primary purpose of this post, but I will cover the other techniques we use as well.
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