Protecting forms from bot spam

Webweaving
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This might be a shot in the dark but it’s totally relevant to webweaving so I’d thought I would ask anyway:

If any of you are using forms (contact forms, webring submission forms, guestbook, etc) that you have made or are hosting yourself, do you have any means of ensuring that form submissions cannot be made by bots, or at least the possibility of submission by bots is minimized? If so, what methods do you use? Is this something that is actually a problem in your experience?

(“Hey Melvian, I thought you’re in hibernation!” Yes I am, but this is the only place I’m checking, mainly because xandra and I are in the process of transferring Safonts’ ownership, but I also wanted to post this now because I have been extremely in the mood for webweaving; I have been making several major updates to my website lately.)

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I use my own fork of BellaBuffs, a PHP script, to build my fanlistings. BellaBuffs itself has an isBot() function for detecting bots, which is then used in the fanlisting’s submission forms to block bots.

However, I still got spam submissions from my fanlisting forms, so I ended up adding the option to enable security questions in my BellaBuffs fork. In my own fanlistings, my security questions are simple maths questions, which do help to reduce spam submissions a lot.

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My guestbook also uses simple math questions, it really works :)

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