Can we add a CAPTCHA feature to the Inquiry Form? We are getting a lot of bots and/or spam responses to our inquiry form on our site, but there doesn't appear to be a way to add a CAPTCHA to the form.
9 comments
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Adam Sentz @Leah - We have a number of protections against SPAM in place already. If you can open a support request with some more details we can take a look and see why those are getting through.
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Jennifer Cake Leah this is happening to us as well and has been since August or September. Have you had any luck or figured out a way to filter them out?
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Adam Sentz @Jennifer - If you have any instances you'd like us to take a look at please send us some details in a support request. As I mentioned before we have SPAM protections in place that are, similar to CAPTCHA, effective against bots, but won't stop a person who visits your form and fills it in with bogus data.
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Jennifer Cake Hi Adam,
I already did that a few weeks ago and they told me that the inquiries must have been filled out by humans since you have spam protections and I should try following up with them...which I had already done and confirmed they were bogus. Populi said my only other option was to just delete them :/
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Adam Sentz @Jennifer - Yeah just one of the joys of having forms on the internet. We have a couple and get bogus entries all the time. Hopefully it doesn't take a lot of time to identify and delete them, but if you have any ideas on how that could be streamlined we'd love to hear them.
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Leah Cornelius @Jennifer - nope! According to what I've been told, all the inquiries I had were from actual people sitting at a keyboard typing in their info, which doesn't make a whole bunch of sense to me, but what can you do? Populi didn't seem like they would even entertain the idea of adding a CAPTCHA feature. Good luck!
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Adam Sentz @Leah - I don't think it's a fair characterization of our position to say that we are unwilling to entertain the idea of adding a CAPTCHA. Quite the opposite, actually. We considered adding CAPTCHA, but given how unpleasant they are to use, and how bad they are for accessibility, we decided to do extra work to build in a more sophisticated system that is invisible to human users, but just as, or possibly more, effective than the better-known CAPTCHA system. I took a fresh look at your inquiry and application data, and I don't see evidence of bots getting through, but if you have any specific examples you'd like us to check on please let us know in a support request.
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Leah Cornelius @Adam - I meant no offense. I obviously don't understand the inter-workings that go on with this kind of thing. I was simply letting Jennifer know that this is kind of a dead end. Whoever helped me privately (it could have been you...?) with this issue was very patient in explaining to me why a CAPTCHA wouldn't serve a purpose here. I still don't understand why people sitting at a keyboard would bother doing this kind of thing, but no one has the time to figure out why people do weird stuff.
As an aside, these bogus inquiries did seem to mostly disappear after all the back and forth with Support and from what they could tell, there were never bots, it was always individuals with bogus data.
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Adam Sentz @Leah - No worries. Glad to hear things are going well.