Why do spammer fill the feedback form with stupid urls which not only don't have any meaning but also do not exist at all such as http:// aqohbpurypwt dot com My forms gets hundreds of messages like this. I'm dieng of curiosity. Could it be that some people are advocating Captcha? By the way, although the forum name may not be related but the more I checked the less I found more related than this forum for the question.
I get stuff like that on my blog everyday, at least 100 comments of just garbage. I am wondering the same thing.
The spamming is often performed by either bots or people that are paid to do it. Don't worry -- you're not being specifically targetted. Most, if not all sites get bot spam or spam of some form. Akismet works very well in blocking it.
It's weird. I often find referrer spam, hoping to get people to visit their site when you see referrals from them (even though no-one ever did). For people to spam URL's which don't even exist, that's fairly pointless.
One possible explanation I could come up was that they first submit a form with dummy url and check the page to see if that url appeared, if the dummy url gets published then they post their real URL, so their url would not be known without benefit.
It's just bots or people who work for a few pence lol You need to find a way to stop that, try searching for a 'text captcha' (not those images ones) they are good.
that actualy makes sense, i get hundreds of similar 'comments' in my blogs with urls that are not reachable like http://wwtdsgdfsgdf.com etc but i dont auto approve them and they still post!
Yep that could be a good theory, that way they protect their real URL from getting flagged and auto-blocked by askimet and similar.
Captcha is the solution to this problem. Your probably familiar with it already just never knew what it was for. It's that box on a lot of forms now that ask you to input the letter that you see into a box. Because these bots that spider the web and fill out forms aren't yet smart enough to read graphics, using capture prevents these bots from submitting forms that use captcha validation.
I get this on my blogs and web directories, its no big deal though. Dont even have to touch it on my blogs, akismet seems very good at its job.
Great, and block real humans like me. I suck at Captchas, usually I let Web Visum solve them for me, though it seems hard to solve the captchas from Mollum. These are feeler bots. They're checking only to see that your site will display or email what they post without errors, so that later the owner of the bots can send a smarter spam bot your way and have a better chance of getting spam through. For my last client I just had an invisible label-input pair that says, "don't fill this in" (for users with CSS off or those using a screen reader). The feeler bots do not read labels and will fill it in. Your back-end processing script will not accept any forms with this particular input filled in with anything that's not whitespace. It doesn't work on "smart" bots, but it effectively removes crap from feelers without the accessibility problems of captcha (and if you tell me I can listen to it, yeah, you go take a listen and tell me you can hear the code in there, lawlz). Heh: The Brads - CAPTCHA
Yes, captchas suck big time, So annoying, perfectly described in that comic strip on that site you link to. Captchas (graphical / audio) should be ILLEGAL, they drive people raving mad!
There are two types of captchas I can do, and one of them is for a good cause: digitizing old manuscripts (reCAPTCHA) such as used at Wikipedia. I can solve these ones and the type used by sxc.hu fairly well (though the sxc.hu-type is hard for me and I do miss a lot of them due to the light colours they use). So I'd support the use of reCAPTCHA but still restrict CAPTCHAs to where they are absolutely needed, and not for something simple like filtering out feeler bots. They're dumb bots, easy to keep out. The smarter ones are harder. The Brads++ a comic that speaks to the souls of web developers : )
I absolutely want to know also the very main reason and purpose of the spammers on why they are doing this. They are just wasting their time. If they are paid to do so, that is truly unfair.
I'm using Akismet, and akismet works perfectly. It has blocked every single spam comment ever since I started using it. It's amazing! - and I didn't have to do something for it to work, I just activated the plugin. For Wordpress.