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KanakoTone
KanakoTone
Level 4
May 12, 2017
Question

Form Fills with certain alphabets

  • May 12, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 2303 views

One of the forms on our landing pages is impacted significantly human spammers. Why can I say this? Because I implemented a string field "Is spam?" and set it as a hidden field. For last few days, I received 1500+ form fills, and all of them doesn't have anything in this field. I think it is impossible unless those form fills have been done by human beings.

For a few hours, I set up the smart campaign to send me an alert if the "Is Spam" is empty upon form fill. And, of course this didn't work.

I wonder there are any way to run the filter based on the type of alphabets the form is filled with. The 1500+ form fills are all with Chinese characters (I'm sure because I read Chinese). Is there any way to filter based on the alphabets used?

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    2 replies

    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    May 13, 2017

    For last few days, I received 1500+ form fills, and all of them doesn't have anything in this field. I think it is impossible unless those form fills have been done by human beings.

    It's possible... or someone just watched the fields sent by a human-submitted form and then automated the process (that's what I would do!).

    I wonder there are any way to run the filter based on the type of alphabets the form is filled with. The 1500+ form fills are all with Chinese characters (I'm sure because I read Chinese). Is there any way to filter based on the alphabets used?

    Not directly in Marketo. You can call the Google Translation API from a webhook very easily and detect the language:

    Of course, language detection won't help if they're using a language in which you do conduct business!

    Harish_Gupta6
    Harish_Gupta6
    Level 6
    May 13, 2017

    Hi Kanako,

    Not sure but you can add another field and Change the field display as none "display = "none";" using javascript and then create a campaign and check if the data is available in any of the field (Isspam and new field) then delete the lead.

    Thanks

    Harish Gupta
    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    May 13, 2017

    But if they're bypassing the hidden field they'll bypass this just as well.  All these tricks are ineffective if someone actually inspects the form and then automates from there -- or, as could also be the case here, uses slave labor (no exaggeration) to fill out the form.

    Also, careful with "delete the lead." This only makes sense of the lead doesn't already exist in your database. Otherwise you're letting a malicious user delete leads in your database merely by failing a very easy-to-fail test. (Same goes for ReCAPTCHA, by the way -- you don't summarily delete all leads, only those leads that didn't exist before.)

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