Ozbon Articles

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been receiving a significant amount of spam through the contact form on my photography site.

As a result, I’ve added in a small dollop of anti-spam input on the form – I’ve done this on several forms over the years, and it’s never caused me any problems. It’s probably now only about ten to twenty minutes work (including testing the entire thing) so it’s no hassle – and every time I wonder why I didn’t just put the damn thing in place when I created the original, rather than slamming it in as an afterthought.

In short, when it’s one of my own sites I just never remember. And in some cases that’s fine – some forms just never seem to get hit in the first place, whereas others pop up fairly quickly and get hit by spammers. It’s all very odd.

I know I should just put it in with anti-spam by default. It’s just I never remember. On a client site, it’s no problem, I always remember to do it. But on my own things? It’s just something I forget.

Mind you, I added in a large number of anti-spam features on one particular ‘contact us’ form I did for a client, including the ability to ‘blacklist’ the IP and poster-name/email immediately by clicking on a link in the forwarded contact message – and yet that client never makes use of the features. I know for a fact that they get a whole bundle of spam through it – I do on occasion run through and block a whole load of the IPs for them myself – but I must admit that I don’t really understand it when people decide to not even make use of the tools they’ve been given.

But then, at the end of the day that’s the clients perogative.