Effective Spam Protection for TYPO3 Websites

If you regularly receive spam entries on your TYPO3 website via contact forms, guestbook, newsletter registration or other forms, you will probably be looking for a reliable spam protection. Especially spam bots that fill out forms automatically sometimes generate a lot of annoying spam entries. To distinguish spam bots from real visitors, captcha solutions are often used with forms. Popular solutions include images with distorted or blurred combinations of numbers or letters that are to be recognized and typed by the visitor, or small sums visitors have to solve. Unfortunately, these solutions also bring problems, e.g. that the distorted number-letter combinations are sometimes difficult to recognize even for the visitors, or that arithmetic tasks are also easy for some spam bots to manage.

For this reason, instead of the usual captcha solutions, we have developed our own spam protection extension, which relies on questions that are easy and unambiguous for website visitors to answer, but not for bots, automated. The TYPO3 extension "a7antispam" developed by a7digital adds a validation field to forms in the frontend. If this field is filled in incorrectly three times in a row or not at all, the IP address is put on an internal blacklist and suspicious entries are not forwarded to the recipient. This is primarily intended to prevent automatic spam entries from bots.