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Keeping SPAM At Bay

The hardest thing about having a web site is allowing your visitors to contact you but keeping email harvesters at bay, until now...

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As you travel around the web today, you may notice that there are sites that ask you to contact the company or person in charge as: "me [dot] surname at somedomain [dot] com"; now that may be very annoying, but it's a very safe way to make sure that their email and contact details don't get harvested.

You see there's a law against spamming, but that doesn't stop people coming to your web site, taking all your contact details and putting them in a big database, why you ask? Well because how are you going to track them without spending endless time on the net?

I've come up with a new theory that I have implemented on FireStarter's AnywhereCMS. Where I still leave my contact emails and my phone number, a lot of spamming and hacking today seems to be happing through contact forms, not mine!

You see, I've created a special set of classes and rules that determine whether someone is trying to actually contact you or just spamming or hacking you. It sounds very simple, much like a spam filter, but there aren't many web designers who have implemented and it is very simple!

Another feature that stops hacking dead is data encryption. You'll often see that there are two ways to request data from a script based on the internet: GET and POST data.

• GET data is where the information is within the URL, for example:
  index.php?goto=index
• POST data is information that's sent behind the user's eyes and much safer, for example if you went to submit a contact form on this web site and then refreshed the results page, it askes you "Do you want to submit POSTDATA again?", data that's contained within the browser and not the URL.

As you can gather, POST data is much safer to use in regards to contact forms, and by encrypting  and limiting POST data to only come from forms (so that spammers and hackers can't just send POST data to your site from their computer or a spamming/hacking script) you can ensure that your contact details and web site are much safer! And remember, all this comes with web services and AnywhereCMS from FireStarter! To talk to me about your requirements, discuss a quote or ask for further advice and information, please contact Firestarter Media Group via the online form or email Firestarter Media Group on hello@firestartermedia.com.

— by Ahmed, Created on Sat Aug 2006

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