Hi, I've a form maker form an a website and have received a lot of spam. After changing the form by adding new mandatory fields, I'm still receiving spam mails through the form maker form but from the previous one! That means that the form reply comes without the new added mandatory fields. How is this possible? See Screenshot with the form above and below the transmitted form mail. I checked all forms and there is no other form active. Thank you for any hint in advance.

Hello Selma!

Thank you for posting about this issue!

This is a common issue on Joomla. The biggest problem is, that these are real users, which submit the forms after disabling browser Javascript. And unfortunately this cannot be controlled by Form Maker.

We suggest you to try an anti-spam extension, which will most probably help you resolve this. We have the same problem on our website, and the anti-spam extension does seem to help.

You can try this extension, for example: extensions.joomla.org/extension/antispam-by-cleantalk/

Hopefully it will work for you and help you prevent spamming. Let us know how it goes.
Thank you! Have a great day!

Hi Agapi,

I already tried the anti-spam extension but it didn't help. The issue is that I'm receiving spam contact forms through the homepage but the contact form is not existing at all on the homepage. So how can real users submit a form which doesn't exist resp. is not online?

Why don't you add another captcha option eg. to calculate numbers etc.?

thanks for support in advance.

best regards,
Selma

Hello Selma!

In that case could you please give us temporary admin access to your website? We will try to implement an additional validation, which these spam messages will not be able to pass.

Please send the login information using the contact form on this page. Also make sure to indicate the link to this forum topic in your message.

Thanks! Have a wonderful day!

Hi Selma!

Our development team has checked the problem on your website. Unfortunately PHP validation will not help resolving the problem, since the spam submissions are not done with spambots. As you can see, the values if email fields are in email format, spambots cannot guess the field validation.

However, they are suggesting you to try the following anti-spam extension. It catches the content with random links.
extensions.joomla.org/extension/r-antispam/

Hope this works.
Thanks! Have a great day!

Dear Agapi

Thank you for your reply. As I already mentioned, I already tried the anti-spam extension but this didn't help!

Further I'm not sure if you understand the problem. How can somebody submit a form (not a spambot) which doesn't exist online? Why can a form be submitted by a real person anyway if there are mandatory fields but they are not filled???

I'd be really grateful if you would check this issue properly. The form online has more mandatory fields but the form which is being returned from the same page is not the same one and there is also no other one existing online!

Thank you in advance.

Hey Selma!

Please note, that these users can bypass this validation by altering Javascript of the form from the browser. And since the mandatory fields are validated with Javascript, they can switch them off by writing additional code.

You can also try blocking IPs of these users. Let me know if this helps.
Thanks! Have a good day!