Form Spam Filter

published Jan 10, 2013 10:01am

We've added a spam filter to detect spam from form submissions on SERC sites. The spam filter has been tested for the past two months, modified accordingly, and deployed. All form submissions are logged, but obvious spam will no longer appear in submission queues. If a human user meets our criteria for a spam submission, the user will be notified immediately after the submission and provided instructions on how to recover the submission. We have not encountered an incorrectly marked submission yet, however, and it is highly unlikely to occur.

Also, CAPTCHAs default to 'off' for forms created after January 9th, 2013. The CAPTCHA feature still exists and can be turned on manually, but most often CAPTCHAs cause more problems for human users than spam bots.