Blocking Form Spam by IP address
To combat spam we block "form spam" by IP address, and/or email address.
We have increased our use of "Clean Talk" to reduce spam carts along side spam form posts. Since we started using "Clean talk" we have reduced spam by 95% or more.
The very new approach we take, is that once a visitor is identified as a frequent spammer (10+ spam reports, by IP address and/or email address) then we will not only block them from posting messages and creating carts, we will infact block them from accessing all dynamic areas of your website.
It remains possible that on occcasion a real person (or bot) might be blocked for unknown reasons. There are a few solutions to get the user back up and running.
Encourage them to restart their modems, in the hope of being assigned a new IP address. This is probably the quickest solution.
If you know their IP address, please let our support team know, as we can then take the IP off our block list. You can ask them to search "whats my ip address" on google, and it will tell them the answer.
Or encourage them to login. If a customer logs in, then we don't block them, as we trust users who have logged in. We have security in place to prevent hackers attempting to break in to accounts, and we will also lock out anyone who makes multiple failed attempts to login.
We also have an issue with some IP ranges, where the IP changes on each request. We have identified some common IP ranges, and blocked those. One of those ranges belongs to Hwawei cloud. If you think there is a legitimate user from that network, please lets us know so that we can open access where we need to.
Mark Messages As Spam
Some messages will get through our defences. But we are working hard to ensure our firewall is stronger.
You can help us, by marking any bad messages as spam. You can do this is a few different ways
When you mark notifications as spam, then you are helping everyone else reduce spam, as everyone doing the same helps you.
Total Website Block
If an IP address has more than 50 spam offences, then we block them from seeing your website at all. This is a method to reduce the load that some nasty robots place on our resources.
If the same person makes an enquiry on more than 5 different websites in a short period of time, then this is also a strong single that they are spammers.
Reviewing the Spam log within the CMS
You can review spam that has been blocked in your activity log, tab spam, under the main SECURITY tab. The reason for the block will be shown, but not the content.
Recaptcha Fields (I am not a robot button)