Miscellaneous Hacks - Contact Us Visual Authentication - prevent Spam Bots from sending messages!

Title : Contact Us Visual Authentication

Version : 1.0

Coder : Andy Calderbank & Jason Williams

Purpose : Make your Contact Us page more secure using an image based verification system.

Why : From my other hack it was requested to make this for the Contact Us page - and this is the same hack to secure the Contact Us page from Spam Bots sending messages.

How : This extra feature uses images which are harder for a spam program/bot to interpret than text characters. The user has a choice of 4 randomly displayed images, and the answer is given below. The user must click on that image to proceed, if the incorrect image is selected an error message is shown. The images are randomly shown (from however many are in the directory - you can have as many as you want, just has to be more that 4!) and are automatically created from the images/verification/ directory - all on the fly. Sample images are included with this release, but you can use your own - I recommend using 100 x 100 pixels, in .jpg format and naming the image with a meaningful title (ie A House.jpg) - the extension is stripped so only the filename itself is shown.

To further enhance security, the images are passed through a script which means that none of the images on the screen have file names - and cannot be associated to the question by title alone.

I have been testing this on my forum and have found it to be effective - I cannot guarantee that this will stop all spamming, but this relies more on human input than a computer "reading" the image.

Important : This has been tested on 3.6.2 - I cannot guarantee it will work on anything above, please test with caution - and as always BACKUP FIRST! This will not work on anything below 3.6.0.

Installation :

Please note - if you already have my other hack installed you do not need to upload the images - just go to step 2.

1. Upload the verification/ directory to your images/ folder - make sure .htaccess and show.php are present - if you have problems with the .htaccess file, this isn't vital and will work without.
2. Import Product - product-secure_contact_us.xml

Requirements : GD Libraries installed

File uploads : 39 (including images)
Files to Import : 1
New Templates : 1
New Phrases : 5
Uses Hooks : 1
New Queries : 0

History :
v1.0 - Original release

Done - if you like please click install!

Don't forget you don't have to use the provided images - you can customise these to any you wish - I've used ones that are hopefully universal and everyone will recognise.

[Alibass]

@steadicamop

I have installed this hack and your enhanced captcha image verification hack also on my 3.6.8 board and both are working fine. Thanks for the great mods!

I have also made the change to display from 4 to 6 images. That works great too, however I tried the same change "$amount_of_images_to_show = 6;" to Contact Us Visual Authentication product and it still displays the 4 images. Is there another change that needs to be made to get this mod to display 6 images in contact us?

[Alibass]

@steadicamop

That's okay mate, I found what I needed to edit and I got it working with 6 images.

Thanks again!

[Evolution06]

wow! this mod is a life saver I was getting all sorts of porn and spam contact emails not anymore! lol *clicks install*

[athlon64bit]

I couldn't get it working on 3.6.8

[jags2ooo]

Originally Posted by athlon64bit

I couldn't get it working on 3.6.8

Same doesn't seem to work o n 3.6.8 oes anyone know of another anti spam contact form?

[bulbasnore]

Dunno how well these plug-ins will work for us at stopping comment/account spam, but the implementation if amazing. Our spammers are faced with 697 choices. Gotta catch 'em all, ftw.