Lately we have been seeing an influx of spammy submissions on forms, even ones with CAPTCHAs. Are bots getting better at defeating CAPTCHAs? Or are these real humans? I don’t know. Has anyone else experienced this? Is LW considering how AI might make CAPTCHAs less reliable? What is the next step?
Thanks Jon – we saw an uptick in some spam submissions to our own internal/marketing forms lately, but enabling reCAPTCHA seems to have helped in those case.
Just curious, do the spammy submissions seem “convincing” in any way, or is it just obvious bot-garbled stuff? I wonder if you think it might be possible to programmatically identify fake-seeming replies or fabricated email addresses that we might block or even possibly flag as “likely spam” in LiveWhale. 
@karl We had 5 submissions on a single form within the span of about a week in which the content was obviously spam. It looks like really long AI rants. I’m not sure if there is any way to programatically identify it though. I can send a couple of those email submissions to support so you can take a look. I don’t want to post them in a public forum.
The other thing I noticed was that when those 5 submissions existed in the DB, I could not load the LiveWhale submissions page for that form. It was just blank. I removed the entries from the DB and the page loaded again. I did download a CSV of those submissions before deleting them though. I can send that too.
Thanks, yeah it might’ve been some character encoding thing, or possibly some XSS injection attempts that were getting filtered out but in a way that made the HTML display a struggle. Feel free to pop them in a .txt or .csv file and send them to Request Help and we’ll check them out. Thanks!
1 Like