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mysociety / writetothem

Write to your MP, MEP, & other elected representatives.
https://www.writetothem.com
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Add spam prevention to contact form #472

Open abibroom opened 3 years ago

abibroom commented 3 years ago

This is a long-standing problem (neither introduced nor, alas, solved by #467 changes) - a lot of messages that come via the contact form are spam.

I have vague memories of a previous discussion about showing a captcha to non-UK IP addresses, did we do that on another of our websites and find it cut out a good proportion of the junk submissions? Could we give that a try here too? Or other possible solutions?

MyfanwyNixon commented 2 years ago

Inbox looks like this this morning image

zarino commented 2 years ago

@MyfanwyNixon if you had to do a ballpark estimate, how long does it take you to deal with the spam that comes in, in an average week?

MyfanwyNixon commented 2 years ago

Every day I 'select all' and then uncheck anything that might conceivably not be spam. That only takes a minute, obvs. However I then open ambiguous messages - perhaps 2 or 3 - to check if they are valid (they are usually not). Five days a week, call it 10 minutes in total.

BUT there is the additional detail of having to look at inappropriate phrases which is never pleasant first thing in the morning!

zarino commented 2 years ago

Useful to know the cost of it, when it eventually comes to allocating developer time to adding a fix.

In the meantime, I wonder whether more Gmail filters on some of the most common phrases could help cut it down a bit?

dracos commented 2 years ago

Internal discussion at https://github.com/mysociety/sysadmin/issues/1639