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.

[Eagle Creek]

Originally Posted by steadicamop

But as has been proved with the registration, bots can easily bypass the Captcha system - and I thought it might be handy to port this idea over to the Contact Us page.

What about https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...8&goto=newpost ?

[ryancooper]

cool this will work great for us! thanks

[Nathan2006]

Thank you steadicamop

Install

[Eq4bits]

I have had this installed since January and it works great! The vB 'builtin' just wasn't doing the trick, but, since installing this hack I haven't had *any* spambots 'contacting us'
Kudu's steadicamop!

[Chachacha]

Installed. Great add-on. Thanks.

[Mrdby]

yeah intalled works great for me!!!

[Mrdby]

I do notice..that if i click contact us again i don;t have to verify the image...is there anyway to set...regardless if i click contact us 5-10 times it will give me the image page and have me select the image each time?

[Mrdby]

gave me an error message in my plug in system.

Contact Us Visual Authentication 1.00 Error An image based verification system to prevent bots using the Contact Us

[steadicamop]

Any more details than that? A little hard to find out why if it doesn't report what the error is.

Jason

[BushyTea]

Intalled work perfectly on my 3.6.5 version but the spam bots are still getting through it so not sure what to do now.

Doesn't harm the members just an annoyance to me.

Mike