Adding a simple human verification test

Same here..
After a month of no spam, this week they are back. (also on the Guestbook on this site i see)
Looks like they bypass the captcha input. At the moment i block every ip where it comes from, so if the are posting manual, this solves it in time..i hope.

Weird. A few people have reported an increase in spam. One is now logging the entries and says they are valid inputs (putting captcha in). Could it be one person is so sad as to sit there manually entering captcha or have they wrote a script that guess the captcha. Maybe I will look into it. I doubt they have a script to read CAPTCHA yet as I've not heard of any spam increase in Lazarus. But then AG's CAPTCHA uses the servers time to generate a random sequence.

I dont think its manual done...
Just checked my logs quick, and there where strange entries.
Without visiting the site, they GET the addentry.php page, and right after that (within 3 secs) the image.php page with this.

2006-09-21 10:52:02 W3SVC4062 ROME **.**.**.** GET /guestbook/image.php id=325ccaf6cdb9a0e2cc8b729a70432120 80 - 72.184.15.221 HTTP/1.0 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.0) - http://www.mysite.nl/image.php?id=325ccaf6cdb9a0e2cc8b729a70432120 www.mysite.nl 200 0 0 968 266 374

after that within 4 sec, they POST the addentry.php...and some spam is added.

Hopes this helps.
(I'am searching also for a solution)

Carbonize,
i have found maybe a possible workaround/solution..correct me plz if i'am wrong.

Because they get the addentry page automatic, i have changed the name to someting different. someting like addentry_**.php.
I also changed this in the config.inc.php, to kept everything working

I will look if this helps today.

You could also stop search engines spidering your guestbook using a robots.txt file.

I am sure glad my copy of lazarus is inside of a very highly modded version of phpnuke. No spam at all. Plus if they try it will automatically ban them and post there Ip addy on my main page.

Plus I DO NOT allow comments at all.

It was great. A few months of only an occasional spam that was added manually. Now my guestbook is getting hammered by spam and there is no way they are all putting this in manually?

I like the idea of changing addenty.php to another name. Do I only have to change it in the config.php file?

Are there any other new ideas? I love the guest book but I hate having to manage it daily. There has to be an easier way.

Thanks,
Ryan
www.gypsylounge.com

Ok this is getting a bit weird. Looks like somehow they are figuring out the CAPTCHA. I don't have AG here nor do I have it installed as I use Lazarus (for obvious reasons). From the above post I can see they are hitting the guestbook to get the form and are then submitting it complete with CAPTCHA. They have to get the form first for the captcha to have been generated and put into the database. I will look into it if I get time/motiviation.

As to renaming addentry.php rename the file then edit config.inc.php to reflect the change.

Marcoh email me please.

Carbonize wrote:Marcoh email me please.

done..

p.s. renaming the addentry.php works ok here.. (no spam since i changed him)

Also the robots.txt solution must work.

Example if you dont know:
Put a robots.txt in the root of your site.
Put in the the robots.txt file, at least:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /guestbook/

I think this will be a long term solution to fight spam on your guest book.
I don’t know how but the spammers find our addentry.php, comment.php files and our www.yourpage.com/forum/ folder. On my site the addentry page is the number one entry page and comment is a close second.
I have changed the name of both addenty.php and the comment.php file and renamed the directory all of my guestbook is stored in. You need to update the config file to reflect all of the changes you make but this is pretty easy.
(Just to keep it interesting I have left a “forum” folder and two files titled addenty.php and comment.php in the folder. Instead of linking to my guest book the spammers are now welcomed by a giant picture of a can of spam that loops to the comment.php page and back. www.gypsylounge.com/forum/addentry.php . Hopefully this will slow them down a bit)
If you are having the same problems with spammers as I am I recommend you change the name of the directory and the name of those two pages.

Good luck,

Ryan
www.gypsylounge.com

The spammers find your site using Google or any other major search engine. This is why it's a good idea to block them from viewing the guestbook by using a robots.txt file.

Hi,

I just went through these 17 pages...

And it is all very confusing for me.
I am just not so good with php coding

Is there no easy download available with the complete edited files.
Just replacing some files, edit password and go?

I work with 2.4.2

By the way, any idea if in the next release an anti-spam feature (like this) will be build in?

thanks.
Peter

2.4.2 already has anti spam protection in the form of CAPTCHA (image verification).

Thanks,
That is what I hoped for when I earlier today upgraded to 2.4.2

But the upgrade did not went how I would like it.
(Just replacing all the files)
After reading your post, I tried to add a message, and this is what I got.

Query Error
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MySQL Error : Query Error
Error Number: 1146 Table 'ninanauk_agbook1.book_captcha' doesn't exist
Date : Thu, October 19, 2006 09:58:44
IP : 84.26.211.219
Browser : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Referer : http://www.ninanauk.net/gastboek/index.php
PHP Version : 4.4.4
OS : Linux
Server : Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.1b
Server Name : www.ninanauk.net