JohnBs personal blog

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For the past few days i’ve spent almost 7 hours driving in the car and it’s a great time to clean down on all my podcasts - (View my podcast channels) and in one - Security Now an interesting technique for combatting bot spam was talked about and i thought i’d share it here.

The idea is incredibly simple. Take a form which has fields on it, say email address, repeat email address and message. A bot would discover the form fields, fill them with rubbish and submit the form. But what if you put an extra field in the form but used CSS to hide the field? A Bot would still see the field and fill the field with rubbish but on submit you could check for length in the field, if there is stuff in it - ditch the submission as it’s obviously a bot. You’d need to put a label next to field saying something like ‘don’t type anything in this field’ for those visitors that don’t render CSS.

See, incredibly simply, no funky captchas that are impossible to read…