Spam has always been bad online but wouldn’t you agree that this past year it’s become untenable? In fact we have had more than a few members contact us pleading for help to endless online pharmacy and other solicitations. Who needs that?
As a result, this past year we have really cranked up Cloudflare’s bot and spam settings protecting your sites. It helped a little. We also began installing re-captcha by default on all forms, including logins. Surprisingly that did little.
This week Virtual Results began testing a new solution. Instead of preventing the spam submissions this solution essentially throws the doors open, “bring it spammers!” However the submissions aren’t sent directly to you. Instead the submitted content, sender’s ip address, email address submitted and more are evaluated and then allowed or denied.
I haven’t been crazy about the idea up to now, frankly. I’m terribly concerned of losing legitimate submissions due to some algo error. However, after a couple days of testing the denied submissions are dead on as are the allowed. In fact, we have contacted a few clients to confirm that they did indeed receive the allowed submissions without incident. So far so good.
One nice feature: In some situations, like fake email address submissions, our spam solution will inform a visitor their message didn’t get through. I like that a lot because it the user in fact is legitimate it’s clear the message didn’t go through.
In the next week we will be deploying this solution on all sites. If you’d like to be prioritized we are happy to oblige. Simply reach out to Jacob in Support at [email protected].