On Sunday evening I opened up my mailbox to find about 500 Regular submissions to the ABSALE Directory, all sent within a 15 minute period. Evidently someone had let their auto-bot loose on my nice new CGI form. After reviewing the top 3 messages and seeing that they were horrible, created either as scarpers or keyword stuffed sites linking to a main site, I deleted the whole lot.
I searched the internet for “PHP form script” and stumbled across http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/secure-php-form-mailer-script/ which is completely free. This is what is so beautiful about the internet, this guy has put all that effort it to creating something he could sell commercially and he is giving it away for free! Not only that – he is helping users implement changes and much more. Outstanding!
What is so great about this script is the ability to change it to fit your needs. I needed the CAPTCHA to stop the bots from spamming my mailbox. Following his easy instructions I customized the new submit form to fit in with the rest of ABSALE.com. Thankfully, today my mailbox only had about 30 submissions, with about 20% being good quality websites that were accepted in to the directory.